Tímto stvrzuji, že jsem tuto disertační práci vypracoval samostatně a uvedl jsem veškerou použitou literaturu.
V Praze dne 22.4.2013
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Acknowledgements My involvement at the Future of European Welfare Systems, a European-wide research group led by Klaus Schubert helped me to become familiar with key scholarly debates in the field of comparative welfare systems. Moreover, I am indebted to Klaus Schubert, Miroslav Mareš and Petr Fiala for the opportunity to identify the research field I have finally entered and its value in a broader context of scholarly debate on historical evolution of welfare systems.
The intellectual environment of the Department of Political Science at Masaryk University in Brno and the stimulating research visit to the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford were a welcoming space in which my thought could settle and my argumentation could become clearer. I have benefited greatly from the constructive criticism of a number of colleagues from the Politics of Social Policy seminar, first and foremost Barbara Zarate, but also Lim Sang Hun, Jennifer Sigafoos, Emanuele Ferragina, and others.
The research plan would not be possible without devoted intellectual support of Martin Seeleib- Kaiser, my advisor at the University of Oxford. I have also benefited from comments and suggestions about the research plan by Ondřej Císař, Robert Walker, Claus Offe and Peter A. Kemp and discussions with Jakub Rákosník and Dalibor Státník.
Numerous participants at a number of conferences and seminars in Prague, Olomouc, London, Oxford, Münster and Siegen provided me with valuable feedback. The text has been edited with the kind help of John Korba and Laura Brade, whom I would like to thank for their efficiency and professionalism. The evolution of this text would not be possible without tolerance and support given to me over the years by my employer, the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes in Prague.
I would like to especially thank Stanislav Balík, my advisor at the Masaryk University, for his patience, intellectual as well as personal support that went far beyond the usual call of duty.
Invaluable support over the years has been provided by my parents Hanka and Pavel and my grandparents Karel Závěta and Milena Závětová. They were often the first readers of my texts and I have benefited from their broad horizon and scope of knowledge.
My sons Jonatan, Hynek and Ámos enlightened my research process and devotedly followed me on the way.
This thesis is dedicated to my wife Adela, who remains not only the most important source of support, but also the greatest inspiration for me and my work.
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List of diagrams and tables
Diagrams
DIAGRAM 1: The hierarchical structure of the party-state 83
DIAGRAM 2: Propaganda view on the housing domain in capitalism and socialism 96
DIAGRAM 3: Structure of the housing sector according to the Document on Housing (1959) 104
DIAGRAM 4: How to get an apartment 124
Tables
TABLE 1: Proportion of apartments 116
TABLE 2: The financing of individual housing construction 118
TABLE 3: Financing cooperative housing construction 119
TABLE 4: Distribution of monthly rents 122
TABLE 5: Number of residents of Žďár 133
TABLE 6: Resuls in the general elections in 1990 140
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Contents
Acknowledgements ...... 5
List of diagrams and tables ...... 6
Introduction ...... 11
Research outline ...... 13
Research question ...... 13
Problem definition ...... 13
Social control ...... 17
Case(s) ...... 18
Methodology ...... 20
Analytical procedures and techniques ...... 22
Reliability ...... 24
Operationalization and data ...... 25
Criteria for the fieldwork case selection ...... 25
Data ...... 26
Literature review ...... 30
Introduction ...... 30
Functions within the social welfare domain ...... 31
A communist welfare state?...... 35
Social welfare domain as an appreciation of the nature of communist state ...... 37
Social control ...... 40
Real-existing socialism ...... 41
Theories on real-existing socialism ...... 44
Is the concept of social contract an alternative? ...... 48
The crucial role of housing sector ...... 51
Sources ...... 55
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State-society and the sources on feedback in housing policy ...... 57
Summary ...... 59
History of social welfare domain in the Czech territory ...... 61
Austrian-Hungarian roots ...... 61
The Interwar Period ...... 61
Nazi Occupation ...... 62
Post-war “Socializing Democracy” ...... 63
Making an economy socialist ...... 64
Social transformation in the communist regime up to 1968 ...... 66
The offer of Normalization ...... 68
Methodological nexus ...... 68
The Headquarters and their operation ...... 74
The leading role of the party ...... 79
State administration ...... 82
Governing model of the Real Existing Socialism ...... 85
Leading role of the party ...... 86
Actors...... 87
Resource mobilization ...... 90
The story of housing policy ...... 93
Policy turns and shifts ...... 100
The Housing Document ...... 101
Ownership structure of the housing domain ...... 107
Property by Marxism-Leninism: Ideological frame ...... 107
The history of ownership regulation in housing ...... 109
Types and forms of housing ...... 113
The structure of the housing sector ...... 115
Maintenance and rent ...... 120
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How to get an apartment-allocation rules and principles ...... 123
Žďár nad Sázavou ...... 129
The History of Žďár: city, industry, politics...... 131
The Communist Regime in the “City on the Roof of Europe” ...... 132
Housing in Žďár...... 141
The allocation procedures at the lowest level ...... 144
The role of the commission: an institutional legal frame ...... 145
Analysis ...... 146
Political interests and public interests ...... 149
The housing commission and normalization ...... 150
Housing needs: an implicit definition ...... 151
Corruption and non-action ...... 152
Discussion ...... 154
Housing policy in the public sphere: Public opinion, media and propaganda ...... 157
Public opinion, opinions of the public and public space ...... 157
Surveys ...... 159
Mass media ...... 160
Analysis ...... 161
Discussion ...... 168
Conclusion ...... 169
Literature ...... 175
Primary sources ...... 175
Secondary literature ...... 181
Abstract ...... 200
Anotace (česky) ...... 202
Note on illustrations ...... 204
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Introduction
The unexpected fall of the communist regimes in 1989 sparked a renewed interest in the political systems of Central and Eastern Europe. Much attention was paid to the process that led to the fall of the communist regimes and to its causes, but predominantly to the prospects of post-communist regimes. Questions, especially in the field of comparative social policy (cf. Goedemé 2009; Cerami 2010; Cook 2010; Goedemé 2009), were mostly concerned with “what contributed to the fall” and “what will come next”, rather than “what did fall” (Verdery 2005, 337–339). Only a minor stream of this research focused on the functioning of the communist regimes themselves. The set of research projects, which has been aimed at uncovering the nature of the communist regimes, commonly identified in the coercive tools of these regimes and the international factors as the primary causal factor for the persistence of the political systems, namely the dominance of the USSR among its “satellites” (Rothschild and Wingfield 1989; Ekiert 1996).
However, a number of historiographers suggested that there seems to be a place for other explanatory variables, with social policy primary among them, that contributed to the compliance of the population, or even to the legitimacy of the regime, especially in the last two decades before its fall (Verdery 1996, 22–29; Jarausch 1999; Patterson 2008; Rowell and Zimmermann 2006; Lindenberger 2009; Fulbrook 2005; Fulbrook 2002). The political role of social policy has been touched upon only occasionally (Cook 2010, 673), either in detailed case studies on the development of the system of social policy (cf. Ross 2002; Boyer and Skyba 1999; Landsman; Bruce 2009; Duffy and Jarausch 1999; Goedemé 2009; Cook 1993; Boyer, Henke, and Skyba 2008a; Rákosník 2010), or in large-N set studies (Haggard and Kaufman 2008; Orenstein 2008; Cook 2010). As I show in the literature review, there is a wide gap between the mostly non-theoretical and detailed historiographical accounts of social policies of the communist states, on the one hand, and the highly theorized general studies using overstretched concepts of comparative welfare states on the other.
The main objective of this thesis is thus to bridge this gap by setting the grounds for building a theory that would contribute to a better understanding of the political and constitutive role social policy played in the communist regimes. To do so, this study examines the relationship between social policy and political legitimacy by focusing on a case in which the political role of social policy seems to have been the strongest: Czechoslovakia. The other case of the supposedly strong role of social policy as a legitimizing factor—the German Democratic Republic—seems to be relatively well
11 documented, and so I employ some of the methodological insights from that research programme, and I also offer a short comparison of the results using secondary literature in the final chapter.
I propose that social policy became the most important tool for the legitimacy of the communist rule. The mechanism of legitimation could be explained as a form of social control. From the temporal point of view, the advent of this configuration dates from the late 1960s until the early 1980s, and this period is referred to as real-existing socialism in this thesis.
The improved insight into the nature and role of social policy in communist regimes could also offer some leverage to answer questions concerning the post-communist political and social development. There are two challenging aspects of these developments in social policy: their relative smoothness, especially compared to macro-economic reforms; and the relative societal peace achieved by the governments after 1989. Although a plausible theory of “divide and pacify” explained the societal peace of the post-communist transition, we still lack an explanation of the origins of the reported capacity of the post-communist governments to use social policy in a strategic way to pacify the population (Vanhuysse 2006; Cerami and Vanhuysse 2009; cf. Cerami 2010). In general, the theoretical results of this structured focused comparison could shed some light on the relationship between a political system and social policy, a topic that remains a challenge for the research on comparative social policy.
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Research outline
In this research outline, I first begin with the introduction of the research question. Second, I define the problem this research deals with. In order to do so, I introduce the chief conceptual problems this research faces. I argue for a reconceptualization of the welfare system in order to identify functional equivalents of classical Western welfare policies. Subsequently, I specify the selection of cases to be examined empirically to provide evidence to support the objectives of this study. In the next section, I establish the methodological framework and specify the analytical procedures. Finally, the operationalization of the research question allows the identification of the sources of empirical data that will be employed in this study. “In the literature review, the most important issues addressed by the previous research are reexamined in the context of contemporary scholarly literature.
Research question The objectives of the research can be stated in the form of this core research question:
Did the activities of the regime within the social welfare domain contribute to the legitimacy of the real-existing socialism, and if so, to what extent?
Problem definition The identification of a functional equivalent of social policy or the welfare state in communist system, as I argue in the literature review, is not an automated process. In order to avoid the shortcomings implicated by travelling of nominal categories such as welfare state, I describe its potential stumbling blocks: the meaning of welfare spending and welfare activity in general, and the state as an actor in the context of communist regimes. The result of the discussion is the concept of the social welfare domain.
One of the basic—though highly problematic and often contested—characteristics that define welfare systems are the levels of public spending in welfare sectors. Many consider these monetary transactions to constitute a good operationalization of the welfare system. Though the amount of information is limited even for mature Western welfare states (Castles and Mitchell 1992 or Pierson 1995), it is still occasionally used as one of the key indicators of the level of development of the
13 welfare system of communist states (Goedemé 2009, 15), even in cases where this type of aggregate data reveals less information and might even be misleading. There are a number of reasons for the confusion caused by such self-reporting of the welfare spending levels in communist countries. Despite many doubts, there is some general level of shared understanding of the meaning of social spending in Western countries. In other words, such mechanical comparison of seemingly equivalent indicators does not take into account the fundamental differences of the communist economic and political system.
It is not just the evident problems of incompatible economic concepts and indicators of state budgeting between the communist systems and Western market economies, but also the very nature of socialist economies. The central planning mechanism gives the principle of the redistribution of revenues a very specific, and to a certain extent opaque meaning (Szelenyi and Wilk 2010). Take, for instance, one of the central raisons d’être of the welfare regimes in the West – risk of unemployment – in a system where “even work-related income can be characterized as a redistribution” (Ferge 2010, 3). Since communist regimes guaranteed full employment by the “absolutization” of the right to work into an obligation (Markovits 1978), a considerable proportion of the direct costs of treating unemployment in Western mature welfare systems were, in fact, indirect, hidden in the non- monetized costs of preserving unproductive jobs and maintaining set and highly equalized wages (Baxandall 2003).
Besides the reasons associated with the core of the economic system, the larger regulatory framework of the communist regime with its bounded, Marxist-Leninist conception of ownership (Betts 2009) means that simple figures, such as social spending, obscure more than they clarify. Some of the indirect channels of welfare provision were captured by the term “social policy by other means” (such as subsidization of prices of commodities and services), the role of which is considered to be vast in communist systems (Holzmann 1991; Mishra 1999). The general tendency not to acknowledge these fundamental features fully demonstrates, at best, a confusion of nominal social policy with its contextualized and, thus, more comprehensive meaning ; and at worst, a conscious abandonment of the search for function equivalents of social policy in non-Western systems (Ripka 2011).
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Though the academic debate with its symbolic center around the notion of the “communist welfare state” has made many insightful points about the very nature of the welfare provision in communist regimes (cf. Aidukaite 2009; Szelenyi 2009; Orenstein 2008), I am convinced that the recognition of the fundamental differences would mean overextending the concept of the welfare state. The other viable option, the welfare system concept (Seeleib-Kaiser 2008, 11), does not comport with my view, because it redirects attention from the state (or party-state, as I argue below) to other actors without recognizing the importance of the political and regulatory contexts. A clear and meaningful understanding of the role of social policies cannot be based on an overextended concept of social policy, welfare state, or welfare regime. I therefore propose a more general heuristic device of social welfare domain developed along functionalist and constructivist lines. I define the social welfare domain in the following way:
The social welfare domain is the part of the public (social and political) sphere of society where the satisfaction of social needs is performed. I am interested in the aims, outcomes, and functions of actions (or abstention from action) that satisfy social needs through regular and predictable structural patterns, and in the arrangements through which these needs are met. Attention is paid to the “autochthonous” construction of needs, of the hierarchy of values, and of the meaning of welfare within society.
The assumptions behind the proposed concept of the social welfare domain are based on several observations on the overall configuration of communist regimes. Firstly, I opt for a “state-centered” approach. A fundamental feature of communist rule is its strict hierarchical structure. It is widely acknowledged that a unitary axis of power revolves around the Party. The Party itself is in fact intertwined with all branches of political power including the executive to such a degree that the term “party-state” is used once its governmental role is described (cf. Fischer and Leggett 2006; Perlmutter and LeoGrande 1982; Bunce 1999). Geddes offers a similar idea with her broader type of “single party regimes” to describe authoritarian systems where “one party dominates access to political office and controls policy, though other parties may legally exist (2003, 51). The “Leninist” parties are one of its subtypes (Geddes 2003, 52–53).
The state-centered approach within the comparative welfare research has been under heavy and legitimate criticism for its ignoring non-state actors (Amenta 2003). The scholarly cautiousness in focusing solely on the function of the state in comparative welfare research is not applicable here. It
15 is more appropriate to use the state(-party)-centered approach in the case of communist regimes compared to its Western counterparts, since the role of non-party-state actors is usually low or even negligible. Valerie Bunce aptly describes it as an economic, social and political monopoly and penetrated potential rival actors, be it economic actors or intermediary bodies such as trade unions (1999, 20–25).
The communist regimes themselves indirectly facilitate such interpretation by advancing the Marxist concept of avant-garde of the working class and regularly embody the primacy of the Party even into constitutions by declaring its “leading role” in society. The leading role does not apply only to the highest level of the political system. A closer look reveals that even different levels of government reproduce the same pattern, sometimes metaphorically depicted as a fractal-like structure (Csanádi 1997).
Moreover, the role of the party-state is not confined by the liberal constitutional notion of limited government. Unlike the mature welfare states, where governments attempt to guarantee a minimum or modicum of welfare, the communist systems were themselves producers, and to a large extent monopolistic producer of not just welfare, but wealth in general. Since vast majority of the workforce was employed by the state (directly or indirectly through state-owned enterprises), their income essentially came from the state. Although private property was not fully eradicated, the tight regulation of ownership rights, along with the belief that private ownership would eventually be decreased, engendered its de-facto suppression. Therefore, the state in effect designated itself as the chief and only guarantor and regulator of welfare.
As a consequence of the unitary hierarchical structure, the line between what functionalists call latent and manifest functions might well be identified. The association between intentions of the ruling elite as a manifest function and the actual policies is, or at least might be much more direct, compared to the Western systems. It is therefore justifiable to research the connection among the motives of the party-state and the actual role of the policies, and even to presuppose that the ruling elite primarily seeks the legitimating function (see Orenstein 2008, 82). The focus of this research is the political role of welfare activities, so it accordingly aims at uncovering the legitimating mechanism exercised in the social welfare domain.
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Social control Building on the previous research of the interaction between political order and social policy that came up with the concept of social policy as a social control function (Piven and Cloward 1993), I argue that the understanding of welfare activities be conceptualized as a form of social control. The major difference between the radical tradition of critiquing the welfare state as a form of oppression and my understanding of social welfare domain in communist regimes could once again be identified in the political context. Since the social control concept assumes a unitary basis of power held by the ruling elite, it is more appropriate to apply the concept to the communist regimes than to the pluralist orders of the West. Moreover, the social control function presupposes not only a bearer, but also a conscious executor.
There might be two perspectives on the intentions behind the execution of social control. Either the intentions might be literarily understood as conscious behavior on the part of the central leading powers in the policy process, or as a systematic feature that does not need to take into account any direct consideration of the ruling elite. I propose to combine both these approaches, following both the general logic of the system by adopting functional perspective, as well as tracing some more significant and empirically based motives. However, as Patterson warns, “smoking guns” (Patterson 2008, 18) of what I termed manifest functions might not be found. The structural approach corresponds to the definition of latent function, whereas the direct intentions are equivalent to the concept of manifest functions. In this way, I also overcome the shortcomings of the radical tradition: empirically weak evidence in support of oppressive intentions.
Social control is the mechanism that connects measures within the welfare domain with the result, legitimation. My understanding of legitimacy does not entail the “strong” normative meaning of the classical Weberian concept, but rather a less bounded sense of what Pakulski and Dogan call “quasi- legitimacy” (Pakulski 1986; Dogan 1992). There is no doubt that the communist order rested to a significant extent on the use of repression, both by the domestic sources represented by the secret political police, and externally by the Soviet army. Thus, social policy could not fulfill the normative demands of legitimacy, defined by Pakulski as a situation where “binding decisions can be made independently of the manifest threat of sanctions and promises or rewards, “(1986, 47). The legitimacy is not more than absence of credible threats, whether real or potential, to the regime, and it is a symptom of the loyalty of the society.
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Case(s) It is necessary to stress that the configuration of the communist political regimes was by no means constant, so it would not be reasonable to approach communist regimes as a uniform single and constant entity. The most suitable period for the study of interaction between the welfare domain and the political order is what I define as “real-existing socialism”, a period sometimes teleologically referred to as “mature” (cf. Baylis 1971; Bren 2008; Maier 1999; Brown 2000), ahistorically as “late communism”1 (Kalyvas 1999) and also sometimes referred to as post-totalitarianism (Linz and Stepan 1996).
The primary defining feature of this phase of development of communism is the fact that, around the beginning of 1970s, the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe made their last systematic and serious attempt to consolidate their political authority. It was a response to post-Stalinist attempts at economic and even political liberalization processes in the 1960s. This period stretches from the late 1960s to the 1980s, and its main characteristics are the abandonment of the utopian- eschatological ideals, rejection of the pluralization of society and the economy, and reinstatement of the leading role of the communist party. The mobilizing effect of the utopian Marxist-Leninist progress that was able to add to mass mobilization and substantiated temporary sacrifices in the name of the bright future gradually evaporated. Also, the brutal and public violence characteristic of the 1950s was not an option any more. Material wealth moves to the forefront of the attention of the leadership, and the structure of demands and awards of the people changed accordingly. The role of social policy, be it innovation, expansion or even just functional change due to transformed context, increases significantly.
In order to provide a detailed probe into the social policy of the communist system, a specific domain has to be chosen. The selection of housing policy for a detailed analysis is substantiated by its representative nature, but also by its conceptual accessibility. Housing policy is traditionally considered as one of the core social policy sectors (Richard Morton Titmuss, Abel-Smith, and Titmuss 1974, 47). It contributes highly to social stratification, primarily, but not merely in a spatial sense. What makes it more appropriate for my analytical purposes is its definitional feature: embeddedness within legal and regulatory structures. An understanding of housing policy might, in fact, be adequate only when the ownership structure and its legal and regulatory context is taken into account. This
1 The term late inevitable places the regime on a definite time scale implying, ahistorically, its finality. 18 fact makes housing policy, unlike social security or education, a suitable representative of social policies in the communist regimes.
The communist regime has so far been described here as a single entity developing in time. On the one hand, there is a good substantiation for such an approach, namely the dominance of the USSR in the so-called socialist camp and the imposition of some of its basic principles and features on all satellite countries. The diversity of communist regimes, noticeable on the extent to which communist power was monopolistic and, thus, successful—is yet another strong argument for differentiated treatment of individual countries. The decision to select Czechoslovakia builds on three reasons and is further supported by an existing and highly regarded classificatory scheme.
The communist regime in Czechoslovakia was one of the most stable and durable in Central and Eastern Europe. Some other examples of relatively weak opposition, low concession of the regimes towards it or extent of repressions could be advanced, but none can measure up to favorable economic conditions for communism in Czechoslovakia (and the GDR), at least from the Marxist point of view. By far one of the two most industrialized and modernized countries (together with the GDR) present the finest case of what I later define as real-existing socialism, a reconfigured regime from roughly 1970 until the early 1980s, when the economic slowdown and the decreasing net birthrate caused further reconfiguration. Though there are number of pitfalls in single case studies, the selection of Czechoslovakia, the methods proposed to successfully examine this case, as well as the theoretical ambition of the thesis justify the focus of this thesis on one case. In addition, I employ some earlier insights into a case with similar characteristics, the GDR.
A classificatory scheme proposed by Kitschelt uses the criteria of legitimacy by providing a multidimensional nexus that allows us to differentiate between different cases (Kitschelt and Mansfeldova 1999). Although his types of communist rule do not have much power to explain change within the communist systems, it still provides a good starting point, and also provides a basic system that can be refined. According to Kitschelt, both GDR and Czechoslovakia fall into the category of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes (1999).
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Methodology The choice of methodological approach is dictated by the phenomenon studied, but also by the conceptual framework set above. The format of this study conforms some of the definitional criteria of crucial case study as defined by Gerring (2009). Since crucial case studies presuppose a viable theory, I use the available methodological leverage of the research on the German democratic republic in a fashion similar to what George and Bennett define as structured focused comparison (2005, 60–68). From a global perspective, German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia are “no- variance” cases, which according to Munck “facilitates close examination of a causal mechanism and yield descriptive insight into new political phenomena” (Munck 2004, 107).
Even if I have identified some sources of theoretical inspirations including Kitschelt’s classificatory scheme or Bunce’s conception of state socialism, these are still components that do not form a coherent single theory that could be tested or improved. Thus, I take an inductive approach and utilize the research genre called the “building-block” format. As a “building block”, one’s research should contribute to theory building by identifying “common patterns that do not vary in the dependent variable” (George and Bennett 2005, 102).
Case study must rely to a large extent on historians for their data, as Lustick shows (Lustick 1996, 605). The problem that arises with relying on secondary data from historiography is twofold: First, the selection bias; and second, “theoretical and perspectival commitments”, which is itself mostly implicit (Lustick 1996, 613). To overcome these challenges, I employ triangulation of the historiographical accounts and my own empirical research. The triangulation of the historiographical accounts of the political and social history of the Czechoslovakia is based on familiarity with the structure of debate on the central issues. By understanding the positions of individual authors and different schools, one is able to get insight into the construction of particular historical narratives. The plan for the original empirical research is outlined below.
The dynamic element of the birth of real-existing socialism could be captured within the framework of the comparative historical institutionalism. In particular, the development of the real-existing socialism is a form of process that fits what Collier describes as “process tracing”, which “examines diagnostic pieces of evidence—often understood as part of a temporal sequence of events or
20 phenomena—with the goal of achieving and refining causal inference” (Collier 2011, 2). Comparative historical analysis is by definition a methodologically eclectic field, but some have denied a place for interpretive approaches within its boundaries (Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003, 23). Due to the fact that the available useful data direct us towards the interpretive approach, the research attempts to reconcile constructivist approach along the lines of Giandomenico Majone’s work on policy process (Majone 1989; Fisher 2006; Fisher 2006; Majone 1980) and advances in the area of concepts of change by historical institutionalists, particularly Kathleen Thelen (Mahoney and Thelen 2008; Streeck and Thelen 2009; Locke and Thelen 1994) .
The constructivist understanding of needs follows Majone’s framework for studying policy as an intellectual construct that needs to be defined by the analyst (Majone 1989, 147). Certain conditions, as Majone stipulates, become policy problems only if norms are set to recognize them, and the process of recognition is by its nature a constructive enterprise (Majone 1989, 24–26). Policy making, which I have defined as catering to social needs, is then norm-application. The actual empirical research on the construction of needs and their catering to is directed by logic similarity to the ones used within the study of construction of social problems. The very point that it is useful to perceive “social problems as processes of interaction that produces social problems as facts in the society” (Spector and Kitsuse 2001, 140) matches the conception of needs adopted by this study. Furthermore, I adhere to Spector and Kitsuse’s assertion and use the analytical techniques that focus on empirical evidence through “specific production of social problems by individuals or groups” (ibid. 2001, 8).
In the case of Czechoslovakia, the actors are interconnected in a simple nexus of rule-makers is the unitary party state and rule-taker (defined as workers by the rule-makers) and the rules themselves. The empirical study thus follows the interaction between norm-setting and norm-adoption as recorded in written documents produced by both the rule-makers and rule-takers. The rules about the allocation of housing are a combination of explicit legal norms, such as laws, and implicit rules that have to be studied by assessing the documentary evidence about particular allocating body including its interaction with its clients. The use of “client” is not accidental, for it refers to the ambition of the communist systems to transform housing policy into (social) service. The subject of these services is thus client, rather than citizen.
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The change of norms is studied here following the framework of historical institutionalism. Previous insistence by institutionalists on the idea of critical junctures (Capoccia and Kelemen 2007) does not offer us much methodological assistance, especially if the research focuses on a change that is revolutionary. The development of “real-existing socialism” comports better with the logic of Thelen and Streeck’s incremental change to transformative results (2009, 103–106). Since I presuppose a move of social policy from the periphery to the core, and no major changes in policy instruments were reported in the period (Schmidt 2004, 111–115; Deken 1994, 52), we might expect to observe the type of change characterized by Thelen and Streeck as conversion. This type of gradual transformation covers “redeployment of old institutions for new purposes” or “new purposes attached to old structures” (2009, 108–112), and so there seems to be room for combination of constructivist norm-setting of Majone and gradualist approach to changes by historical institutionalists.
The fact that housing policy as a research discipline is commonly regarded as a field that defies straightforward evaluations and analytical frameworks, and the fact that it commonly uses the analytical tools of economy and analyzes the housing system as a market, do not necessarily present a disadvantage. As I have argued, the same applies to policies of the communist regimes in general, where classical tools developed for Western countries have limited or no use in an unaltered form.
Analytical procedures and techniques Due to availability of the data and their quality, it is not viable to use quantitative methods, and so an idiographic study remains the only possibility. The main analytical technique used by this study is a documentary analysis following the interpretative turn in social science (cf Fisher 2006; Majone 1989; Fisher 2006). General stages for a social scientific research using documentary analysis have already been created. These steps fall into two interrelated categories, 1) assuring (or establishing) the quality of the documentary evidence, and 2) its interpretation. However, it has to be noted that these general guidelines could not satisfactorily cover all the different types of documents. As Scott points out, “each particular source requires slightly different handling” (1990, 2).
The establishment of quality of the documents builds on procedures known as historical method. Scott’s, Lustick’s and Thieses modifications to adjust the protocol used in historiography for social scientific purposes is adopted in this thesis (1990; 1996; 2002). The analytical process proceeds
22 according to the plan described by Scott’s categories of authenticity, credibility, representativeness, and meaning, all of which structure the control of the textual quality. Authenticity as well as credibility overlaps largely with what historiographers call external criticism (Edvardsson 1998). In essence, it is a scrutiny of the authentic nature of the particular document of series of documents using both external and internal evidence. Credibility determination poses questions on two distinct aspects: sincerity and accuracy. While insincerity could be approached through an evaluation of the potential motives for deceiving the readers (J. Scott 1990, 26), the inaccuracy is about the relevance of the text to the research question. The iterative process of the archival research should open a space to move from initially set collections of material to other, if the accuracy turns to be insufficient.
The representativeness of the document also has two aspects. To determine the representativeness, one should not only look at other potential sources that existed in the past but are no longer available, but also scrutinize the conditions under which the documents survived, taking the archival “sedimentation process” (Hill 1993) into account, which also sets the conditions for sampling procedures. Having selected the relevant collection of materials, a sampling method has to be chosen so that the material is efficiently (and manageably) analyzed. Each particular sampling procedure must be based on a list of all the relevant documents in the collection, usually to be found in search tools such as catalogues, but also on the assumptions about other relevant sources, both available and unavailable (J. Scott 1990, 28).
The “meaning” is largely a matter of the next step, an interpretation itself. Using hermeneutic strategy of analyzing the text helps to avoid the shortcomings of the classical content analysis and semiotic strategies, since it takes the historic, situational, and communication context into account (Thies 2002, 357). This strategy entails an initial analysis of the channels of communication, including the actors, and the wider historical context.
Due to the problem-driven nature of this analysis, the inductiveness of the approach is limited. To bridge the set focus with the inductive approach, I combine thematic analysis with exploratory coding to find topic-relevant patterns (Boyatzis 1998, 6). To have a guide for the thematic analysis, I employ a quasi-interview technique when exploring the text by posing a prepared set of questions similar to the fundamental procedures of content analysis (Carney 1972, 51). These questions are
23 directed towards the motives and reasons behind the actions within housing policy. They are understood as a norm-setting on one hand (central policy-related documents), and the norm- adoption (documents capturing the actual enactment of policy and societal feedback) on the other.
The focus of the textual analysis is on structure and normative framing of the relevant arguments (Yanow, Schwartz-Shea, and Ginger 2006, 341) that appear in the texts. The coding procedure and the subsequent analysis is oriented towards uncovering what Majone terms “implicit rationale of the policy” (1989, 149), which appears in the form of underlying arguments. The analytical procedure deployed an iterative coding process with an axial coding standardization. Codes and the corresponding passages will be entered into an electronic chart. The analytical process of each level of documents follows the classical three-step sequence of coding, with its open, axial and selective stages. Through the organization of memos written on patterns into codes, core variables and their sub-topics, I identify the dominant patterns in the texts.
The coded segments of the texts are scrutinized by constant comparison (Ezzy 2002, 95–100) in a fashion similar to hermeneutic interactive approach (J. Scott 1990, 41). By employing both the documents of the party-state provenance and the ones capturing the societal response and comparing the results of their analysis, it is possible to approach all three components of the documentary analysis: intended content, received content and the mediating content (J. Scott 1990, 55).
Reliability The strategies to deal with the reliability of findings of this study are manifold. The appropriate sample ensures “efficient and effective saturation of categories” in order to “account for all aspects of the developing analysis that are initially less than obvious” (Morse et al. 2008, 8). I also use triangulation to ensure the synchronic reliability (Flick 2009, 385) of the data at different levels of openness and of different types in order to cross-check the results. The research process is spelled out so that the procedures are transparent and use what Seal calls “low inference descriptors”, closely reporting the process of analysis (1999, 189). By consultations with experts and fellow researchers, I obtain critical feedback in the form of “peer examination” (Seale 1999, 148).
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Operationalization and data The operationalization of the research question follows the aforementioned selection of the policy domain and the definition of social policy field, or the social welfare domain, as I have defined it. The attention of this thesis is thus devoted to the construction of housing needs, its change and the way society interacted with this definition imposed from above. The system of housing policy itself has a symbolic center in the allocation of housing. The allocation principles are defined not only by the respective legal framework, but also by larger legal structures and set of non-legal formal and informal rules. These are set by institutional framework at both central and local levels and also by informal networks. The allocation itself does not entail only the distribution of state-owned housing, but also the indirect regulatory institutions that structure the allocation of housing within all other types of ownership. The particular allocation mechanism to be examined resides at the local level, because in both cases, the actual allocation came under the purview of the housing committee overseen by the municipal authorities.
Criteria for the fieldwork case selection2 The choice of the particular locality has to fulfill certain criteria so that the sample approximates the ideal of “real-existing socialism”. As described in the literature review, the newly built socialist cities or city quarters present us with the best approximation of an environment favorable to the creation of the harmonious urban units along the lines of the leading Marxist-Leninist ideology. Social control, as defined here, should not “be needed” in these newly constructed social niches, as the cities themselves are beacons and blueprints for the rest of the country with its more complicated, inherited housing stock.
2 Originally, I had chosen Havířov in northern Moravia. Havířov is/was built on a fully socialist blueprint. It was established only in 1953 as an architectonic, urbanistic, social and ultimately political experiment. Unfortunately, I learned that the funds of the housing commission from the normalization period were destroyed by accident in 2003, and so I chose to use Žďár nad Sázavou as a case study, for which the selection process is described in detail in the respective chapter. 25
Criteria
Loyalty
- strongholds of the communist power (favored regions that formed showcases in terms of economic and industrial production)
Positive: a) economic specialization transformed by the communist regime (not solely building on existing traditions) b) number of citizen members of the communist party c) large non-private housing stock d) developing region with possibility of upward economic mobility
Negative: e) low incidence of dissenting voices (groupings) f) not in a center (Prague) g) not in a rural region (less supported, housing more private)
Data To summarize the arguments that are relevant to the selection of data to answer the research question, I propose that the usual indicators of social policy do not have comprehensible meaning within the communist political and economic system. Considerable welfare activities are non- monetized and mostly regulatory. These assumptions concern the validity of the statistical data, but what about the data’s reliability? There are number of reasons to doubt that the strong presence of political interest combined with the political penetration of relevant institutions that gathered data and made them public did not distort the reliability of at least the data publicly available at that time (cf. Goedemé 2009; von der Lippe 1999). In addition, the monopoly of power of the party-state did not allow public scrutiny of the procedures of data production. However, the central planning and the strict hierarchical rule of the communist regimes created a demand for the level of reliable information necessary for successful governance.
I draw two conclusions from these considerations about the data. First, the statistical sets are
26 important source, but they speak more about the aspirations of the communist governments than about the social situation. Second, the level of openness of the information, ranging from secret information designated just for the central authorities—or, in some cases, only for the head of the communist party (Bruce 2010, 19; Kaplan 1993a, 37); to public information, correlates negatively with the level of reliability. The reliability increases with increasing secrecy. These two conclusions inform my approach to the data in the case study. The differentiation of the levels of secrecy (in other words: original access options) is outlined below.
The impracticability of the use of statistical data leaves us with no other option than an idiographic study based on qualitative techniques. Before proceeding to their short characterization, the usability of interviews should be briefly discussed. Interview techniques are relatively widely used by social historians or even social scientists studying communist governments in Czechoslovakia and GDR, where the research is far more complex. There are, however, important sources of “noise” [or what Scott terms reduced credibility (1990, 25)] that make them obsolete. What is commonly identified as problematic about the reliability of interviews becomes even more pronounced in my cases (Flick 2009, 388–294). Today’s democratic regime in the former Czechoslovak territory (now Czech Republic and Slovakia) defines itself against the “dark” period of the communist regime. The pressure to distance itself from the communist regime creates a structural barrier that severely limits the depth of interaction as well as the types of narrative produced (Mühlberg 2004, 52). The incentives for post-rationalization are also extremely high, due to the informal rules in the housing policy, some of which have become morally unacceptable. As Markovits puts it, the interviewees naturally tend to present themselves as “someone, who deserves a place in the new society” (Markovits 2002, 832). Though there are attempts to resolve these issues, the accounts do not present a persuasive case for sufficient elimination of the noise (cf. Markovits 2010; Bruce 2010, 27; Madarász 2003).
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The data used by this thesis vary not only according to the openness, (termed access by Scott 1990, 14), but also to the level at which they are produced and to the subject of the producer:
Open
1) legal documents 2) Party documents -party rally speeches
-closing declarations
3) Official statistics 4) Semi-secondary literature -official research on housing policy/social policy
Semi-open
1) unofficial reports (“grey zone” research) 2) dissenting movement documents 3) foreign analysis
Closed
1) Materials and minutes of party committees (both central and specialized) 2) Governmental materials and minutes
Secret
1) Secret police reports 2) Social surveys
The construction of needs and rules for their catering will be studied via the materials of the central authorities, namely the politburos of the Central Committee of the communist parties. The societal feedback material consists of complaints. The allocation mechanisms are captured in documents of the housing committees of the municipal councils. The secret documents, which played role in the construction of needs and in the development of the rules for allocation, are primarily part of the
28 collections of the Central Committees of the respective communist parties (cf. Dennis 2000; Fulbrook 1997; Kaplan 1993a; Kaplan 1987). If the actual study of these background and periodical reports shows that more specific research is needed at the collections of the originator (the Secret police), the plan of the archival study must be extended. The plan of the archival research must be reflective and flexible in order to prevent selectivity (J. Scott 1990; Hill 1993; Thies 2002). A structured list of the basic primary data and their repositories is enclosed in an appendix.
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Literature review
Introduction This literature review situates the presented research endeavor of this thesis within the existing scholarly literature. The research question concerns the political function of social policy in the communist states. It attempts to uncover the mechanism through which social policy performs political functions, namely the creation of legitimacy of the real-existing socialism phase of the communist regime. Since the discussion of scholarly literature relevant to this thesis is not confined just to this section, and a treatment of the specific literature relevant to the more narrow field is found in each chapter of this thesis, this general literature review deals with the most important broad problems my research must address in order to be situated in social science, but also to clarify and support the fundamental framework set for my thesis.
This literature review is structured as follows. First, the welfare domain, the sphere in which social needs are catered to, will be structurally examined for the functions performed in it. The existing and seemingly contradictory approaches of the radical tradition and the structural-functionalist theories are both suitable to deal with the political functions of social policy. I therefore critically synthesize these approaches so that the theoretical grounds for functional analysis of the social welfare domain are prepared.
The next section provides the reason for the introduction of the welfare domain. It is the serious failure of the existing literature to capture the basis of the role and shapes of social policy in the communist systems. The argument for the introduction of the social welfare domain as a more general and therefore suitable concept is supported by demonstrating that the current scholarly literature which uses the concept of communist welfare state is unable to acknowledge the fundamental features of the communist state. To illustrate the failure of the “communist welfare state” approach, I examine the relevance of social rights in the context of communist regimes. Building on that, I provide the justification for the usefulness of the concept of the social welfare domain.
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Moving to the phase of real-existing socialism, I provide substantiation for the specific choice of this period. The real-existing socialism phase of the communist rule is defined by illuminating its position within the confusing spectrum of existing terminology in political science and historiography. The subsequent section offers a critical overview of the prominent theories that try to explain this system and its specific features. The political functions of social policy were already touched upon by some previous scholars using a quasi-theoretical model, i.e. a new social contract. As the main alternative to the proposed approach, it is introduced and its main shortcomings are identified. The excessive universality of the social contract and thus an overly complicated way to capture it empirically reminds us of the need to specify the field in which my research question is examined.
In the next section, I argue that housing policy a good proxy for activities within the welfare domain during real-existing socialism. This policy presents a field that both fits as a good proxy of a social policy in real-existing socialism, and it is also suitable material for research, due to conceptual problems inherent in most of the other sectors of social policy. Finally, a problem with sources brings the review back to the theoretical level, in order to elucidate the sources that are suitable for the study of bottom-up activities influencing the housing policy in real-existing socialism. The review concludes with a summary.
Functions within the social welfare domain The research question seeks to identify the political role of activities within the social welfare domain. The term ‘role’, in my understanding, means a configuration of functions. The very notion of different functions is inherent in most of the comparative social policy research texts. There are two different, and in a sense even opposing, relevant sources of theoretical inspiration: the functionalist approach to social policy (and the social welfare domain) and radical, dominantly neo-Marxist notion of social control. The common aspect of these paradigms is that they allow for broader view on the role of social policy in society.
The idea of political and control functions of social policy is not new. Authors as diverse as Richard Titmuss and Peter Ward, current analyst of politics in Latin America, touched upon these functions. The father of the analysis of social policy, Richard Titmuss, addresses the issue of different functions
31 of social policy by pointing to what he calls “discourage of alienation” objective (1976, 22). Peter Ward’s approach is, in some regards, more empirical. He creates the term “political mediation” to describe the instrumental utilization of social policy in Mexico in the late 20th century (1993).
Probably the most systematic attention paid to the process of legitimation by social policy is in Huck- Ju Kwŏn’s manuscript on the welfare state in Korea (1999). His concept of the politics of legitimation builds on a process that comes into play when “the normative grounds of the overarching institutional polity are challenged, and those in power attempt to legitimize their activities by use of measures such as social policy”(1999, 3). The questionable part of Kwŏn’s approach is the inherent preference for democratic legitimacy within the whole theory, whereas the politics of legitimation are present only if democratic legitimacy is deficient (1999, 24). As we shall see further in this chapter when dealing with the radical tradition of critique of welfare states and in the conclusion, this problem cannot be ignored.
The contribution of the functionalist insight lies in a proposition of clear explanatory tools for the overlapping of different functions, both of social policy and other related processes. I will build on the synthetic account and evaluation presented by Mishra (1977, 43–60). The functionalist paradigm rests upon identification of basic social functions that are present in all social bodies including societies on the state level. Parsons enumerated these functional elements, which he calls subsystems. The adaptation function is primarily performed through economic tasks; goal attainment—by political tasks; integration—by tasks that lead to harmony; and solidarity and pattern maintenance (or latency) is concerned with continuation of basic patterns. Each social institution, in this case even a domain, is concerned primarily with one of these functions, but it is usually involved with the other three functions to varying degrees as well. The primary concern of welfare institutions is the integrative set of functions. The objective of social integration is a survival of the collectivity, i.e. a social body, which is the communist regime in this case. Social policy as a maintenance of order is thus a way to prevent a rupture in social peace by ensuring harmony between elements and the whole. Mishra concludes that “[m]aintaining order is a leitmotif of a good deal of ‘welfare activity’” (1977, 48). He concludes that this is the primary positive contribution of functionalism to the understanding of social policy. The value of the insight into other aspects of social policy offered by the functionalist approach is more disputable. Mishra identifies three major problems to which the functionalist view inevitably leads: explanations of development, lack of grasp of the difference between intended and unintended outcomes, and the universality of function. 32
The leading principle of functionalist conception of development of social policy is the differentiation of institutions and organizations. Such a linear and rather vague paradigm is, as in the case of social rights, rather an obscuring analytical tool and might have normative elements. The same applies to the ability of the functionalist paradigm to differentiate between intended and unintended outcomes. Merton partially corrects this deficiency by introducing a latent and manifest function dyad. Latent functions loosely correspond to the unintended functions, whereas manifest functions to the intended ones. The principle of difference between latent and manifest functions lies in the recognition of the results (Anderson 1961, 9–10).
Gans uses Mertonian functional analysis in order to show latent functions of the poor in society (1972). His research touches upon an important issue of intent of the actors and the “apparentness” of outcomes. He follows Mertonian dichotomy of latent and manifest functions of different social actions. This line is crucial because the fact of its recognition distinguishes Gans (and my) analytical approach from the radical (mostly Marxist) analysis: “One difference between my analysis and the prevailing radical view is that most of the functions I have described are latent, whereas many radicals treat them as manifest: recognized and intended by an unjust economic system to oppress the poor.” (Gans 1972, 288). 3
Looking at the radical literature itself, best represented by classical work of Piven and Cloward (1993), there are more issues stemming from the latent/manifest dichotomy. These issues are illustrated by examining the symbolic center of these debates: social control. Functionalists have been attacked for producing a paradigm which is inherently reactionary and conservative (Gouldner 1972). Mishra states that “functional analysis sees social institutions primarily in terms of their ‘positive’ contribution [to the ruling power]” (1977, 58). The reactionary nature of their view on functions of society is the founding principle of self-preservation of the system. The substantiation of maintenance of order as a natural tendency of any system is seen by the radicals as an argument given to the ruling power to substantiate its questionable political activities. Gans is well aware of this accusation. Even if he perceives functional analysis as inherently neutral, he still explicitly positions his own version of it as non-ideological and neutral (Gans 1972, 287). This neutrality situates itself implicitly as a middle ground between the conservatives and the radicals. Most of the
3 However, he follows with dismissing the practical importance of the distinction by showing that once a latent function is revealed, it might not be latent anymore (1972, 288). This obviously does not apply to the historical research, and it also reveals Gans own activism. 33 problems with the radical critique are contained in insufficiently specified mechanism of what they term social control. An overview of the main problems is provided together with the methodological solutions proposed to correct it.
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A communist welfare state?
Could the functional analysis be performed using the established classical tools of comparative social policy? The following probe into the utility of the welfare state argues that the current widespread practice to apply the concept of welfare state to the case of the communist regimes disregards the specificities of the communist regimes, namely the nature of the state and the intricate meaning of welfare or social policy. The introduction of a social welfare domain presents an effort to develop a heuristic device that should be more capable of dealing with the context of the communist regime.
The most important contributions in theoretical as well as empirical understanding of the social policy of the communist regimes have recently been published by Haggard and Kaufman (2008), Tomasz Inglot (2008), and Jakub Rákosník (2010). All these authors use the term welfare state in the context of communist regimes. Rákosník calls state socialist countries or people’s democracies, Inglot, Haggard and Kaufman “socialist welfare state”. Aidukaite recently explicitly argues in favor of the theoretical soundness of the term “communist welfare state” (2009). All these researchers tend to participate in this way in the broad discussion on comparative welfare systems, so they accordingly connect their methodological and conceptual framework to the research on welfare states of the West. I call for caution in travelling of the concept of the welfare state, since the very content of both welfare and state might not be clear and transferable. All these authors work to some extent with the concept of social rights, with Aidukaite and Rákosník directly relying on the concept. That is why an introduction of an alternative approach commences with criticism of the meaning of social rights in the context of communist regime.
Social rights? Though there have been some attempts to refine the idea of social rights4, the academic community still builds on the original version presented by T.H.Marshall in the 1950s (1998). There are three major reasons why a “social-rights-based” definition of welfare state may not be transferable to the communist systems: its reliance on certain conception of citizenship, its normative content and its somewhat misleading semantic meaning.
4 For an overview of the debate see Cox (1998). 35
The concept of citizenship as defined in constitutional orders of the Western political regimes and could not be traced in communist regimes. Following the Soviet example, the notion of citizenship was replaced by the notion of worker. Worker, as defined even by the façade constitutions, was the bearer of rights including nominal social rights. Due to the extent to which state became the ultimate employer, the structure of entitlements was bound to the employees of the state. Such a system of rights and obligations naturally consists of principles different from the Western concept of citizenship.
The clear normativeness of Marshall’s argument is even boosted by the proposed (or even prescribed) linear development. According to Marshall, social rights constitute the next step after the introduction of civic rights and political rights (1998, 94–101). Decommodification could not be an alternative. Although the concept of decommodification possesses a different structure, it is, at least in the widely shared view of Esping-Andersen, a phenomenon that follows from the exercise of social rights. As Esping-Andersen states, “social rights […] entail a decommodification of the status of individual vis-à-vis market,” (1990, 21).
Mishra points out that social rights could have been viable—in his opinion even useful—for the “golden age” of the welfare states in Western Europe, but since then, they have been attacked from not only ideological, but also methodological positions (1999, 116–117). Even he himself, despite being self-admittedly a proponent of the normative content of social rights, concedes that these attacks are partially substantiated (1999, 120–125).5 The substantive character of social rights implies that they come into conflict with other rights, namely economic and property ones. Though there are some examples of older (Deken 1994) as well as recent (Rákosník 2010; Aidukaite 2009) pieces of research on communist welfare systems based on the “social-rights-based” definition, the normativeness and weak and shattered foundation of the notion of “rights” obviate its use in the context of communist systems. Social rights therefore are not a prism through which the social policies of communist systems can be understood.
5 Mishra advocates “social standards”, which are built on the concept of needs. The original conception uses the term right and associates social rights with political and civil ones without acknowledging the difference between the procedural character of political and civil rights on one hand and substantive character of political rights on the other. 36
Social welfare domain as an appreciation of the nature of communist state The misleading nature of the “communist welfare state” model is twofold: firstly, the sole idea of state is problematic in the communist context, as I will shortly indicate. Moreover, the guiding principal of the “welfare” part of the model must be clarified. As has been shown, the social rights could not hold water. Attempts to define the “welfare” by nominal definitions, such as reliance on formal administrative categories, do not lead to the establishment of functional equivalents of social policy. Since another guiding principal is needed, the welfare system is discussed as an alternative option.
The role of the government in communist regimes differs from the role governments have in constitutional liberal democracies. The existence of decision-making centers of communist parties, or more specifically their headquarters, is reflected in the “party-state” term (Ekiert 1996; Csanádi 1997; Kitschelt 1995; Bunce 1999). It would be misleading to label the governmental structure as a sovereign or even a leading body. It is undoubtedly the communist party that dominates in the fused party-state mono-organizational order (Bunce 1999, 24). The high level of penetration of virtually all institutions and the fractal-like nature of the party state structures (Bunce 1999, 29) reproduced at each level (Csanádi 1997) allows me to opt for relatively straightforward “party-state-centered” approach and to discount the other usual actors, such as private companies, trade unions or social movements. The distinction between the party-state and the state is still not artificial, since it has utterly practical consequences for the sources on the construction of policies. In other words, the sources produced by the communist party headquarters as decision-making centers form the ultimate material to learn about policy making compared to the governmental records depicting merely execution of their commands.
One of the attempts to deal with the confined nature of the “welfare state” is the concept of “welfare system”. The establishment of this broader concept is motivated by the discontent with the guiding principles of the welfare state and by its sole focus on the state. Seeleib-Kaiser identifies this principle to be a social risk, and he defines a welfare system as a “social arrangement, which insures against social risks in a collective, highly regulated, and/or redistributive manner with a relatively high degree of certainty for future claims,” (2008, 11). “The system” (previously the state) is translated into the definition by the regularity of its actions, and by recognizing the patterns of action within welfare systems as highly regulated and possessing a high degree of certainty. Regularity and
37 predictability presupposes a high level of shared meaning of a process and its stability. Analytically, this does not necessarily presuppose formalization of the process and may thus be a useful feature in my own definition.
In the end, however, social risk does not solve the potential cultural bias of the concept of the welfare system entirely, since there might be no objective enumeration and description of social risks. Moreover, risk itself is an idea that projects some future states and situations. Once these future projections have happened, the risk as a projection loses its sense. Apart from this inherent problem with the nature of risk, it would be confusing to use a concept motivated by the rejection of state as a sole provider of welfare. Though it has been stressed out that the party-state does not equal the state, the founders had rather keep in mind non-state actors, such as private companies, when they rejected the welfare state concept.
But is there any concept that could hold up to the objective or the inter-subjective (culturally neutral) demands? To keep the possibility for comparative methods open, one should not capitulate and simply turn to definitions that emerge within the subject of research. The impact of such a turn in the context of communist regimes would actually result in an inability to recognize the differences between the communist façade rhetoric and the actual meaning to the members of the society.
Conflicting demands on analytical tools—the benchmark criterion and their cultural relevance—could be settled by a combination of both, as this text will demonstrate. The benchmark used here are social needs. According to Zutavern and Kohli, it is a concept parallel to social risk (2010). A philosophical debate about needs is set on the line between complete cultural and moral relativism and the generally shared needs that directly lead to particular institutional design that is set up to satisfy them (Plant, Lesser, and Taylor-Gooby 1980, 20–23). Note that there are two levels of the debate: first, primary level of the debate concentrates on the question of existence of general basic needs that are immanent to all humans. The second level of the problem is concentrated around the link between a need and a way to satisfy it.6 As Plant et al., and more famously Amartya Sen, noticed, satisfaction of needs have to be legitimized by its goal. Sen offers his notion of capabilities (1989, 24– 26) whereas Plant et al. opt for harm (1980, 33–36). Plant et al. forcefully argue in favor of universal
6 Similar arguments that appear in the debate on needs can be identified in the debate on human rights. 38 human needs—survival and autonomy—but even more forcefully warn against the idea of inevitable socio-political consequences of these basic needs, stating that “the same aim [satisfaction of human needs] will have to be pursued differently under different circumstances. What changes from age to age and society and society is not the general human need but a) what is possible and b) what will work, given existing social institutions, attitudes etc.” (1980, 51). The idea of universality is accepted not because I have no doubts about it, but because the level of the generality may be sufficient to include communist regimes of Central Europe.
Before presenting the definition of what I call social welfare domain, let us sum up the applicable aspects of social policy I have so far identified in the traditional or mainstream definitions. The welfare state has been rejected due to its confusing stress on state, and more importantly because of the principle of the “welfare”, usually social rights. The welfare system definition encapsulated the regularity and predictability of actions based on shared meanings. Needs-based definitions are a useful tool for delimitation of the research space of this thesis, but it needs to be supplemented by an insight into the hierarchy of values (and thus needs and their catering to) as produced and understood within the system. The research is based on the belief that this notion of production might not be captured within the welfare system, so I propose the social welfare domain as the unit of analysis. The inescapable cultural embeddedness of any particular notion of needs is acknowledged and, for this reason, has to be balanced by an analysis of internal system of meanings and their production.
The social welfare domain is the part of the public (social and political) sphere of society where the satisfaction of social needs is performed. I am interested in the aims, outcomes, and functions of actions (or abstention from action), that satisfy needs through regular and predictable structural patterns, and in arrangements through which these needs are met. Attention is paid to the “autochthonous” construction of needs, of the hierarchy of values and of the meaning of welfare within society.
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Social control One of the ways the radical tradition within comparative social policy captured the political use of the welfare measures is summarized by the term social control. The definition of social control, which is seen by many as a central sociological category, is a contentious topic about which arguments among radical and conservative researchers take place. Higgins offers a useful overview of the literature on social control (1980). She uncovers the extreme variety of meanings for social control has and lists the main possible conceptualizations:
1) control as repression;
2) control as exploitation;
3) control as co-optation;
4) control as integration;
5) control as paternalism;
6) control as conformity;
7) control as self-determination (Higgins 1980, 15).
The most prominent representatives of the radical group, Piven and Cloward, reinterpret the history of developments in social policy by what Higgins calls social control as repression and social control as co-optation, here in the sense of buying off the potentially subversive groups. They assert that “Expansive relief policies are designed to mute civil disorder, and restrictive ones to reinforce work norms,“ (Piven and Cloward 1993, xiii). On the other pole of the spectrum is Maurice Janowitz, who, in the line of what Mishra calls classical functionalism, denounces the negative connotation radicals and Marxists ascribe to social control. He attempts to revive what he calls “the original meaning: self- regulation” (Janowitz 1975). Higgins sees a place in the notion of social control for each of the specific concepts mentioned above. She rightly highlights the problematic procedure of the radical view: the construction of the opposition of the system (or ruling class) and the people (Higgins 1980, 22).
This problem is, at least preliminarily, resolved in the communist system, since the definition of the ruling class, nomenklatura, is arguably straightforward. However, with the contested focus on the
40 state and power, even this conclusion drew increasingly criticism (Fulbrook 2002). The polarity between social history and totalitarianism-based research is inhabited by various conceptions of configuration of state, society, party, elite etc. It would be premature to side with any particular approach at this stage, but both extremes can be rejected: totalitarianism and the pure Alltagsgeschichte that tends to ignore political power of central authorities.
If we turn back to the problem of intent, and to the Mertonian latent and manifest function, it is again another way, perhaps more lucid one, to rephrase this discord. Whereas the radicals construct the power center and ascribe all the outcomes to intent, Gans (1995), Higgins (1980) and Skocpol with Amenta (1986, 136) warn against short circuits. We side with cautiousness towards theoretical attacks on pluralist liberal democracies and call for attention to what is being preserved and maintained—in other words, to the context. It seems extremely ideological to dismiss all politics and policy-making process with another version of false consciousness as the radicals do. Even if this author does not believe in value-free science that does not recognize the difference in quality between authoritarian and liberal democratic systems and does not side with the latter, still, there are indications of a source of empirical grounding that defends my approach from attacks on its bias.
Our preliminary findings about centrally planned policy-making and hierarchical principles of loyalty and power within the communist systems indicate that it might be possible to identify some intents, an instance Patterson calls “smoking guns” (2008). Moreover, we intend to find an imbalance toward repression in the communist social welfare domains. That does not, by any means, imply that this study is going to follow single-sidedness of the radical tradition and ignore the primary function of social policy, integration. Higgins rightly calls for empirical tests and better conceptualization of actors, especially when it comes to intents (1980, 22–23).
Real-existing socialism So far, the features of communist regimes or states were treated in general. The general model of communist regime encompasses wide variety of countries and a relatively long period of time. The diversity of these systems and their developmental phases is generally accepted. In order to specify one particular configuration in time and space—real-existing socialism—semantic confusion caused by lack of shared concepts must be clarified. Having determined the meaning of real-existing
41 socialism, I turn to the theories that might help explain the legitimating role of social policy in this type of regime.
The term real-existing socialism is a relatively widely used and vague label used in historiography, mass media and occasionally also in social sciences. The term emanates from the official discourses of the communist regime. The program of building “real-existing socialism”7 coincides roughly in CEE countries with the period of the 1970s and late communism. The term has been used to denote the formulation of a new program at the XIV. Congress of the Communist party of Czechoslovakia.8 The self-reflective component in this meaning denotes the then awareness and acceptance of temporary measures that did not necessarily lead to the rapid establishment of “socialism”. This aspect conforms my own understanding of the period. However, this element has later been dissolved by a widening of the meaning. Today, it usually refers to the regimes (a topos) themselves as opposed to socialism as a utopian concept. Its coverage therefore expanded to the whole period of communist systems.
This study sticks to its restricted definition as a phase in the development of communist regimes characterized by the demise of means of mass mobilization and utopian ideals as opposed to material consumption. It uses real-existing socialism as a phase of communist rule in the Central and Eastern Europe, which represents a serious and general attempt at the consolidation of political authority, beginning approximately in the 1970s. It is marked by the “restoration of order” that followed the intervention into Czechoslovakia in August 21, 1968 and by the termination of attempts at economic reforms in some of the countries. The construction of authority follows different logic from the order of Stalinism. The reformulation of the basis of the legitimacy (and thus power) of the regime included openly decreased demand on ideological commitment. The fall of communism represents the ultimate termination of this attempt. The quotation marks are kept to denote the distance from the original usage of the term by the regimes themselves.
The semantic field is by no means vacant here, but it suffers from various deficiencies. A short review of the most common conceptualizations—late communism, “mature communism” and
7 It also appears in the form of “real socialism”, “actual existing socialism” or even “really-existing socialism”. Other combination of “real”, “socialism” and “late” include “late real socialism” as used by Kabele et al.(2003) 8 Strong inspiration came, as usually, from the USSR and its XXIV. Congress of the CP of USSR (cf. Boyer, Henke, a Skyba 2008b, 775; Cook 1993, 22). 42 normalization—might help to increase the accuracy of real-existing socialism. The authors that employ the term late communism commonly do so in a relatively vague manner, usually in contrast either to early communism (Maier 1999, viii) or by distancing it from the transformation period (Brown 2000, 2). Both alternative definitional features refer to the finality of communist regime. Lateness as well as earliness does have meaning, but only in conjunction with the end. Without finality, there is no scale of early and late.
“Mature communism”, as introduced by Alfred E. Mayer and used by Baylis, denotes a period of completed consolidation, especially in terms of completion of basic apparatus of industrial order (Baylis 1971, 211). The focus on industrial relations and an ambition to cover all the regimes of the communist bloc does not conform to the intentions of this thesis, but the notion of maturity is not far from my understanding of real-existing socialism. Connor (1997) modifies the term by introducing “maturity of communism”, a period during the 1970s defined by the growth of real incomes and the expansion of welfare benefits. Since this text aims at an empirical investigation of such claims, employment of this definition would bring serious methodological problems of circular arguments.
Another overlapping term, neo-Stalinism, is used by Swains to describe period of “normalization”, i.e. the 1970s and 1980s in Czechoslovakia (2009, 146–172) to the ascent of Gorbachev in the USSR. Swains stress the importance of the Brezhnev doctrine, which itself highlights the limited sovereignty of CEE countries. Contrasting framing has been offered by Pollack and Wiegehold (2004). In their overview of the periodization of communist regimes in the CEE, they classify the end of 1960s and all of the 1970s as “period of stagnation” (2004, 231, 238). Taking their specific perspective on dissidence and protest movements, their periodization does not contradict the one adopted here. The political science tradition created two primary conceptualizations: state socialism and post- totalitarianism. Both terms are unfortunately vague. The former is used more in its economic meaning and is more commonly denotes the whole period of communist rule; the latter itself locked into fierce debate on totalitarianism itself. The conformance of the periodization of housing policy, namely “The new wave of centralization” identified by Hegedüs and Tosics in the years 1969–1980 (Hegedüs and Tosics 1996), with the “real-existing socialism” suggest that the notion does not contradict the general trends within the housing sector.
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Theories on real-existing socialism The selected case, Czechoslovakia is, together with the German Democratic Republic, are widely considered the most stable case of communist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1960s, Czechoslovakia was faced with the need for reconfiguration of the legitimacy of the regime. The pressure on reconfiguration stemmed from different sources:
the crisis of extensive orientation of the economy and the threat to the dominant role of the party following attempts at economic reform;
consumer demands from the population;
the crisis of ideological engagement (the 1968 invasion);
the opposition and revisionist movements that needed pacification.
One impetus is shared by both cases: the serious damage to the regime’s legitimacy, i.e. the consent of the people, caused by the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia; however, the nature of others differs. Though the imbalance between the strength of these stimuli is undeniable, the 1968 invasion was nevertheless the single most important impetus for social unrest in both the countries from 1953 for GDR and the communist turnover in 1948 in Czechoslovakia. However, the major social unrest that all the communist countries of the region experienced are connected to the end of Stalinist period, namely 1953 in the GDR and 1956 in Hungary and Poland. Ekiert classifies the 1968 crisis in Czechoslovakia as a “delayed response to de-Stalinization”, but that seems to be a formal assessment so that fits his narrative (Ekiert 1996, 18). The difference in timing of the open social crisis, however, does not discount the general impact for either country of the 1968 invasion; nor for the fact that economic opening of GDR in the 1960s was, similar to Czechoslovakia’s opening in the second half of the 1960ss, gradually waned around the turn of the 1960s.
By the beginning of the 1960s, changes in the highest ranks of the communist parties in both countries, as well as the reconfiguration of social policies occurred nearly simultaneously. This common trend, a reconfiguration of policies as a response to the common experience of failed economic reforms in the 1960s, is sometimes called “normalization” as an overarching term for the whole region in the 1970s (Hübner 2003). This overlaps the period was defined as real-existing socialism. The shape, extent and quality of the reconfiguration differed. The measures leading to the reconfigurations did not include much of crude legal measures, most of which were already in place by the 1960s. The reconfiguration took the form of increased importance of housing that impacted
44 the investment strategy, with the GDR having housing as one of the main explicit goals after 1971. In Czechoslovakia, the shifts primarily consisted of the setting of the mechanism of prices of housing (and related expenses) to a stable level (Musil 2010). Shifts in the allocation practices are also presupposed.
The goals of normalization were clear- to stabilize the situation and reconfigure the resources of the regime so that its sustainability would increase. It is generally assumed that out the countries of the communist bloc, these efforts were most successful in and Czechoslovakia (the GDR, leaving the “special” cases of Romania and Albania aside). Previous research has traditionally ascribed the durability of these two regimes to the effectiveness of their repressive policies (Kalyvas 1999). This seemingly plausible equation could not, however, explain the relative inexistence of powerful opposition (at least compared to Poland and Hungary) and also relatively favourable public view on the period visible in both societies from 1990 on (Murthi and Tiongson 2008). The functions offered by the social welfare domain could be the missing part of the puzzle. To present preliminary theoretical framework and the hypothesis, I need to look at the theoretical repertoire that could be used in order to capture my initial intuition.
Setting aside for the moment the enormous attention to the fall of the regimes, the theoretical accounts for the crises under/during the communist regimes are comparatively rare. There are two relatively robust paradigms that could add clarification to the model: recent rational choice models of functioning of non-democratic states (Wintrobe 2000); and the model of legitimation of regimes, originally designed by Herbert Kitschelt (1995; 1995; 2002), to explain post-communist political party systems and their diversity. Generally speaking, most of the research effort so far has been focused on the repressive tools of these regimes while the repertoire of tools from within the social welfare domain have largely been neglected (Večerník 2008).
Rational choice approaches view the power and stability as a function of two distinct phenomena within non-democratic regimes: repression and loyalty. The process that occurred throughout the 1960s and peaked in the early 1970s could be rephrased in terms of rational choice. Using Wintrobe’s dictionary, the price of loyalty increased with the decline in the legitimation power of ideology (Wintrobe 2000). Since the failure of the attempts at pluralization and the economic reforms of the 1960s seemed evident and the return to increased repression seemed too costly, it
45 can be reasonably assumed that both regimes sought to pay higher prices for loyalty. What were the exact ways of tackling the increased price of loyalty? As has been set, housing policy seems to be one of the obvious arenas where the increased price for loyalty would find expression.
The contribution of Kistchelt et al.’s account of historical pathways towards post-communist polities to our methodological framework could extend beyond the mere reinforcement of the argument for case selection. Kistchelt et al. model of communist rule has stood the test of time well, and so it is widely used and recognized within academic discussion without any major critical comments (see Pop Eleches 2007; Ishiyama 2006; Bunce 2000; and Whitefield 2002). However, for some of the literature on the post-communist processes, this typology of communist regimes might be an excuse for the scant attention given to the communist roots of the post-communist situation. At best, as with the case of vast majority of relevant social policy-oriented studies, attention to the communist period remains a by-product. Let us look at the core of Kitschelt’s typology and specify a problem with its explanatory power for the real-existing socialism period.
Kitschelt’s types of communist rule are constructed along two basic dimensions. The degree of reliance on bureaucratic-authoritarian rule can also be refined byincluding indicators of level of corruption within the system as well as clientelism and patronage. The second dimension consists of the “mechanisms communist parties employed to instil compliance in the population to extent to which rulers after Stalin’s death and during the ‘post-totalitarian’ transformation tolerated a modicum of economic and political pluralism” (1995, 22). The main mechanisms of compliance are repression and cooptation. As I have noted above, both the Czech part of Czechoslovakia and the GDR are considered to be clear examples of bureaucratic authoritarian communism (Kitschelt 1995, 40).
Upon closer inspection, the functional logic of this type reveals that, when we consider the field of interest—the social welfare domain in those particular countries—the model does not appear to fit well. The bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes should create a harsh and hostile climate for opposition forces, and their functioning is closest to the totalitarian model of the one party state: an all- powerful, rule-guided bureaucratic machine. It relies on a tier of administrative professionals who govern a planned economy that produces comparatively advanced industrial goods and services. Its main modes of stabilization are “repressive strategies and exclusion of vocal opposition,
46 organizational discipline and encapsulation of working class that allowed ruling communist parties to prevail over a potentially strong challenge by opposition forces and to resist the temptation of seeking societal peace through accommodation with potential opposition forces (Kitschelt 1995, 449–454). Despite the fact that the model is not, due to its purpose, well-developed and it is an ideal type in Weber’s terms, which simply builds upon real regimes and follows its own logic, its silence when it comes to loyalty is striking. It might be possible, though overly complicated, to reformulate social control by means of social policy as a form cooptation. It is most likely that Kitschelt equates compliance, a result of actions of repression and co-optation, with legitimacy and sustainability. The problem is that compliance as a result of repression has very different qualities to loyalty, which is in rational choice language a function of distribution of resources. Similar constitutive types of elements are presented by Kabele et al. (2003): the “right consciousness”, which equals compliance, is enabled through a system of rewards and fear. Cooptation is left out due to the specific focus of the study on Czechoslovakia’s real-existing socialism.
I propose to examine the restructuring of activities within the social welfare domain as the chief source of loyalty in Czechoslovakia. Using the aforementioned rudimentary model put forward by Wintrobe (2000), I identify the “repressive“ as well as “integrative” functions of social control preformed there as the missing piece to explain the stability the regime in Czechoslovakia enjoyed throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s. What exactly is meant by the missing piece? The assessment of the role of state activities within the welfare domain leaves us with a puzzle: were those just mediating in principle, i.e. should they be considered as intervening variables in the pursuit of stability, or is it viable to see the repression as the independent variable of stabilization? I do not intend to question the already well-documented system of repression as part of the causal mechanism, but the social welfare domain seems to expose the aspiration to become a full co- determinant. The party-states used social policy in a strategic way, analogous to the way Vanhuyse describes in his account of post-communist social policy development (Vanhuysse 2006)9 and what Ross calls “post utopian materialist legitimation” (Ross 2002).
9 Together with Cerami (2010, 8), I doubt the novelty of post-communist strategic use of social policy. On the contrary, my hypothesis suggests that antecedent strategic use by communist governments played a decisive role later in the successful pacification of civil protest. 47
Is the concept of social contract an alternative? The major existing explanatory frameworks for the legitimacy and loyalty of the people in real- existing socialism are concentrated around the concept of social contract or social compact. There are scholars who deny the very presence of loyalty or legitimacy and simply see real-existing socialism as a period of gradual decay of the post-Stalinist order (Otáhal, 62). One general observation applies to many of the relevant studies on communist regimes of the Central and Eastern Europe: they might be marked by the country their authors are mostly focused on in their expertise, commonly their country of origin. Support for this observation includes Berendt (2009) or Kornai (2008) of Hungary, who categorically rejected any chances of sustainable introduction of market elements in centrally planned economies (while Hungary was the most advanced economic reformer from the late 1960s), or for instance, Sabrow (2009) of Germany with his concept of consensual dictatorship. Whereas the research of communist regimes perceived through prism of the fall of communism pose a danger of ahistorical preference for signs of decay (cf. Walder 1994; Walder 1994; Szelenyi 1978), the process of identifying exceptions and regularities in real-existing socialism could be influenced by prioritization some countries above others. The construction of “real-existing socialism” is reflective in the sense that it attempts to be a heuristic device rather than a descriptive tool.
I have already indicated the intricacies of the distinction between economy and social policy in communist systems. The social contract theories as well as the general economic explanations therefore touch upon field as close to the one treated in this thesis as possible. It gives us an opportunity to improve understanding of the interconnectedness of economic and social policy in the communist regimes. Its failures in the grasp of actors and bargaining environment could serve, on the contrary, as a support for my structural approach.
The general social contract approach borrows from the contractarian tradition of metaphorical explanation of political authority and the nature of citizenship, as it was devised by classical political philosophers John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes (Freeman 1990). The application of this simple metaphor to communist regimes contextualized in particular historical conditions, because it seeks to explain the terms under which the communist regimes, weakened by economic, social and ideological crises made an effort to regain legitimacy (or, obedience, quiescence, acquiescence to rules or simply silence) (see Otáhal 1994; Patterson 2008; Cook 2007;
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Dogan 1992; Lindenberger 2009; Madarász 2009; Fulbrook 2009) of their populations. Similarly to the approach of this thesis, these applied ideas of social contract treat the legitimacy in a limited sense and essentially use the contract as a procedure of conditional exchange. However, unlike this research, the ambition of the mainstream social contract approach is to offer an exhaustive explanation of the post-crisis developments in communist regimes (Ekiert 1996, 7).
There are two general strands in the application of social contract upon communist regimes that differ in terms of the policy outcomes,i.e. what is exchanged. The first, older tradition focuses on the general channels of economic and social provision and the target group is workers, whereas the more recent wave of interest is in consumerism with a consumer as a receiver of the outcomes of policy.
The most elaborate research endeavor using the idea of social contract as a heuristic tool was introduced by Linda J. Cook. She summed up some of White’s structural reflections on Sovietology building, particularly his idea of legitimation by economic performance that he calls “social eudaimonic legitimation” (White 1986, 463) . In Cook’s perspective, the puzzle to be solved by social contract is the “quiescent working class, weak trade unions, but relatively high provision of major policy goods” (1993, 7) . Her empirical testing of a model that specifies the exchange of political goods—political quiescence for economic security and social welfare—takes the case of Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. Cook calls the agreement tacit and she empirically tests whether the policy outcomes, such as employment and stability of prices, were initiated and maintained due to popular pressures. Though her empirical approach yields elegant results, Cook does not provide clear guide on the extent to which her findings are limited to a specific group (“blue collar Slavic groups”) and Soviet Russia in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, her own requirements on the parties that enter bargaining of the contract—constrained government and coherent expectations of the population— are underspecified and lacking a reference frame. Although Ekiert (1996, 23) argues the reductionistic nature of the model of social contract, which presupposes that the decision-making process is legitimate and rational, and claims that this deficiency usually leads to historical inaccuracy, this criticism does not apply to Cook’s argument.
Some of the more recent accounts of re-configuration of the communist regimes treat social contract as a form of conditional exchange of legitimacy for consumption opportunities (Bren 2008; Gallinat 2005; Landsman; Feinstein 2002). The shift from worker to consumer is a consequence of the trend
49 towards social and cultural history. As Patterson’s (2008) overview demonstrates, there is great variation among the case studies and, apart from some basic principles of the social contract, not much is shared among these scholars. Still, the basic elements of the social contract—the content of the exchanges (rights and duties), the bargaining parties with capacity to operate (or in different terms a public sphere where the bargaining takes place), and the conditions of the deal—are inseparable from the metaphor itself.
The content of the contract is expressed in a different way, here being consumer satisfaction (Steiner 2004; Patterson 2008) while, in Cook’s (1993) case, it is simply social security. Though the stress on consumer products obviously makes some difference and popular culture might be ignored by Sovietologists, the substance is not that different. The fact that both new and old contractarians use the term living conditions interchangeably with either consumer satisfaction or social security shows that the intertwined economic and social policies do not allow a clear definition of the “social” party of the social contract. Patterman also points out that the capacity of the negotiating parties and the fulfillment is not only empirically difficult to determine for the researchers, but it is also unclear for the parties of the contract themselves (2008, 26).
The application of various variants of social contract theory on the normalization period in Czechoslovakia has already been a matter of discussion in the past. The dissenting historical research has already theorized about the normalization period using the social contract metaphor. The remarkable warning of Milan Šimečka against the use of social scientific concepts “ostensively”, meaning to label a concrete historical event demonstratively, is applicable to real-existing socialism, the use of which Šimečka was originally criticizing, as well as to the imprudent use of social contract theory.
The main critics of the utilization of social contract theory in the case of the 1970sand 1980s in Cezchoslovakia are Kieran Williams and Vilém Prečan. Prečan (1993) replaces the mutual relationship of the social contract with an image of a failing leadership and fear, while Wiliams (1997) tests his propositions empirically. What are their arguments? Williams points out the weakness in the conception of guarantor, since in this case the USSR was favoring one side of the contracting parties. He also questions the topical credibility of the economic offer of the upcoming normalization in the context of the late 1960s. Prečan stresses the de-mobilization effect of the capitulation by the
50 leaders of the Prague Spring during the occupation by the USSR. However, even Prečan admits that in effect, the new order was based on some kind of exchange between consumer life and private welfare’ on one side of the transaction.
To summarize, the research using social contract framework illustrates the impracticality of of making a clear distinction between economic and political policies of the communist regimes. Though the social contract model offers some insight into the content of social, economic and cultural provision, it is not practicable to meet all the requirements of the metaphor. This fact makes it generally unsuitable for this research. However, there is a phase in the analysis of the general frame of real-existing socialism in the chapter entitled “The Offer of Normalization”, where a specific use of the heuristic tool of social contract has its place.
The crucial role of housing sector This research focuses on housing needs and their catering to as a form of performing legitimating functions in a particular domain of the “real-existing socialism”. The following section reviews briefly the general characteristics of housing policy and discusses its position within the communist regimes and, more specifically, during real-existing socialism. I argue that housing policy is a suitable proxy to study the political functions of social policy.
Housing policy comprises a large proportion of social policy, and Fahey and Norris (2010, 493) even call it a cornerstone of the welfare system. Similarly, Carter and Polevychok (2004, 5), regard it as a platform for effective social policy and Titmuss (1974, 30) includes it into what he calls core social policies. Though housing policy may be difficult to measure and evaluate in comparison to the other, more transparent policy sectors, its importance is boosted by its public perception. In the later period of communist regimes, housing, at least rhetorically, became one of the chief priorities of communist governments. It can be assumed that it has been one of the chief demands of the populations of these countries as well.
Housing policy in general is among the prime factors of stratification. Its distributive effects contribute significantly to vertical, horizontal and spatial stratification. This fact makes it powerful
51 tool in (re)shaping of society. As Skocpol and Amenta concluded, “…a detailed look at programmatic profiles and particular policy provisions reveals that state-socialist authorities in centrally planned economies closely tailor social insurance and housing policies to the exigencies of labor discipline and control of migration” (1986, 135).
Housing policy operates with a diverse set of instruments. Fahey and Norris (2010, 480) propound a classification based on the presence of monetization of these tools . Fully monetized instruments include, for instance, housing allowances or capital grants for housing construction, and they are usually easier to measure and evaluate than the non-monetized and partially monetized tools are. Indirect, or legal, non-monetized instruments include rent-controls, rent subsidies through social housing, tax biases, and influence of interest rates above others (Fahey and Norris 2010). However, the most important set of housing policies exist in the legal environment. The legal norms that shape housing practice for both for tenants and owners—be it state, private owner, cooperative or for instance enterprise—are not confined to specific provisions focused on housing. An even more profound source of determination of these practices stems from more general norms than specific property rights.
The identification of particular elements of the set of instruments is a very open and case-sensitive process, as Hegedüs and Tocics (1996, 30–32). show on the example of indirect control of private initiative in construction In centrally planned economies, land policy as well as manners in which construction materials and building services are supplied play an arguably crucial role in shaping of the practice of housing (Hegedüs and Tosics 1996, 20). A thorough analysis of housing policy thus must be country-specific and, because a comparative framework is difficult to set, it must largely be a matter of induction.
“Housing” is used here in two distinct senses: housing as a capital asset and housing as a service. Both these meanings are embraced by the housing policy, and the existence of private ownership within the housing sector predetermines two distinctive features of housing policy. Firstly, there are potentially at least two submarkets in the housing sector: one market where housing as service is traded, and the market where housing as a capital asset are allocated. Secondly, the housing stock is a physical entity with certain properties, and it inevitably induces relative inertia or continuity. For instance, housing stock needs periodical renewal, its restructuring is highly cost-intensive, and it is a
52 highly durable sort of investment. For this reason, the outcomes of shifts and changes may become noticeable only after several decades have passed.
In communist regimes with centrally planned economies, both the service and capital asset markets within the housing sectors are inevitably limited by the general (but never full) replacement of market-based allocation by planning and by strict limitations on property rights, while de-facto introduction of entirely new forms of partial property rights occurs (Mlcoch 1992). The main determinant, as Tocics and Hegedüs (1996, 27) show, is a political power rather than the economic one. Völker and Henk demonstrate the political background of allocation practices in housing policies in German Democratic Republic and state that “[h]ouses were rarely bought or rented on the market but allocated by the authorities." (1997, 242). Despite the initial drive towards eradication of housing as a capital asset, no communist state succeeded in turning housing into sole service (Hegedüs and Tosics 1996, 19–20). The reason for the structural holdout that prevented the complete transformation lies in the inherited housing stock combined with the high transaction and administrative costs of a radical rupture.
This study accepts the fact that housing sector is a sphere that defies any straightforward frameworks and takes simple analytical and evaluative methods into account. As it builds on persuasion that the same applies to other sectors within the communist social welfare domain, this does not play against housing. The promise of accessibility stems from the direct role of the communist party and the official authorities subordinated to it in the allocation of housing (Hegedüs and Tosics 1996, 32). The value hierarchy could therefore be identifiable through the rules of allocation as well as their actual performance. Another promising aspect is the fact that unlike the other sectors, exit strategy in housing has a well-defined meaning, namely participation in the quasi- market, informal transactions and individual housing construction. There is also a reason relevant to the reliability and validity of the available data: research in housing has been under less strict ideological pressure compared to the more central categories of wealth10—even if this advantage is very relative, as has been shown by Rowell (2005).
10 This assumption is based on Czechoslovak case and assessment by its prime expert in the field, Jiří Musil (Sociologický časopis et al. 2004) and also on an interview with Martin Potucek, a sociologist active in the “grey zone” of sociological research in 1970s and 1980s (Potůček 2010). 53
The prime interest is partly predetermined by the subject matter and by the definition of the social welfare domain. The translation of needs is clear in principle. It is the “housing need”, while the meaning of its satisfaction is also recognizable. More problems emerge with the social control function. Hegedüs and Tosics (1996) use Albert Hirschmann‘s (1993) well-known scheme exit and voice strategy to capture the interaction between the regulated spheres of voice. In the social welfare domain of the communist regimes, housing was allocated under the supervision of the communist party, and the quasi- and black markets comprised the exit sphere.
This research should therefore not restrict itself only to the focal points of the principles of allocation and its practices including the underlying values and outcomes, the environment in an economic, legal and political sense; it should also pay attention to the exit sphere, an option regulated by the authorities, albeit in an indirect manner. Building on the development of the generally accepted fundamental model of housing sector in communist countries, as described by Hegedüs and Tosics (1996) and supported by Connor’s sketch (1997), the choice of period of study of the communist regimes can also be substantiated in respect to the general tendencies within the housing sector.
The final section is devoted to the source of empirical data through which the housing policy of the real-existing socialist period can be examined. The challenge this research faces regarding the sources of data consists of balancing the usual top-down approach with the bottom-up forces. The top-down view could borrow from the existing scholarly consensus about the structure of power at the top echelons of the communist states, directing us to the relevant sources of data. However, the social response and the part society played in housing policy are still largely a matter of surmise. Since this challenge is rooted in the conception of state-society in general, I discuss the theoretical notions of the state-society relationship and come up with complaints (Czech stížnosti or German Eingaben) as the chief source of data to study societal feedback concerning housing policy.
Housing and urbanism became one of the prominent spheres of building new socialist men and families along the ideal lines set by the Marxist-Leninist ideology (Musil 2005a, 2). The principles of socialist cities integrated diverse elements of constructivist modern architectonic and urbanist thought from the Bauhaus and Soviet planning approach developed in the 1930s, for example, LeCorbusier’s thought on housing functions (Sheppard 2000; Szelenyi 1996). Unlike some other areas of life, such as legal order, new cities and city quarters did not have to deal with remainders of
54 capitalist or bourgeois order, the existing housing stock in inherited cities. These newly constructed complexes therefore presented Leitbilder (guiding principles) for the transformation of the existing housing (Bernhardt 2005; Musil 2005). The ideal of harmonious society was intertwined with the favourable material conditions created by the socialist cities, making the newly planned and built cities the best approximation of the social experiment of the communist regime. These “socialist cities” are thus a suitable terrain for the study of social control, since according to the theoretical propositions of the leading ideology, the harmonious order co-created by the urbanistic and architectural planning allowed for the liberation from social control from above.
Sources Having set the housing policy as a proxy for the study of functions of the social welfare domain in real-existing socialism and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the types of sources for this study must be specified. My definition of the social welfare domain focuses on the aims and outcomes of the housing policy, and on the constructive process of the needs and their underlying values. One set of institutions that had the power to define needs is relatively easy to identify due to the hierarchical nature of the communist states. The unitary system of the party-state permits a straightforward operationalization of the supreme policy-framing bodies. Politbüro, a political section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party forms the core of what Kaplan calls “power centre” of the state (cf. Kaplan 1993a; and Kaplan 1987). The proceedings of the Czechoslovak Politburo are relatively accessible today; more specific treatment of the respective collection is offered in the appendix. More specialized institutions of the communist party and the government management of the housing policy are well identified by the literature in the case of GDR (cf. Schildt 1998; Buck 2004; Boyer, Henke, and Skyba 2008; Rueschemeyer 1990; Rowell 2005b), while the structure of Czechoslovak decision-making process is much less known (Musil 1992a; Musil 1992a; M. B. Smith 2010; Turner, Hegedus, and Tosics 1992). The actual allocation practice has resided in the “housing committees” of the local authorities (Marcuse and Schumann 1992, 121; Musil 1992a), whose collections are, in some cases, also available in local archives. Some specific insight on the role of housing in daily life, but also on its social and political functions, is gathered by Šmídová (1999, 201– 203), but her understanding of the housing policy “from above” is fragmentary and admittedly lacks theoretical foundations
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The depiction of the function of housing policy might not be complete without acknowledging its public perception and the potential impact of the societal feedback on its shape. As Zatlin (2007, 45) notes in general about the research on GDR, there usually remains a missing link between the ruling center and the society, namely the bottom-up direction of communication, while the same statement applies for the Czechoslovak case. In order to identify this missing link, I must return to a theoretical level to determine the general basis for the operationalization of the sources suitable for studying the feedback of society. In this way, this study provides a more balanced account of both the outcome and the potential share of this feedback on (re-)forming the housing policy. Since this theoretical apparatus is largely missing for the Czechoslovak case, I must first draw from the literature on the GDR.
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State-society and the sources on feedback in housing policy One of the defining features of non-democratic regimes is the limited establishment of systematic feedback channels, a role played by elections, public surveys and generally by supply. However, the feedback element is not entirely missing, since some kind of “exit or voice” is inevitable in the long term. Fulbrook is convinced that responsiveness is a general feature of any modern government including a communist regime. She contends that no modern government can ”seriously risk ignoring the views of its population—least of all a government [of the GDR] that wants at least some basis for the claim that it has been supported by 99 percent of the population” (Fulbrook 2005, 6). Within the debate on the nature of GDR, more sceptical voices about the existence of public sphere and the nature of consensus prevail. Lindberg’s concept of “staged consensus” that is carried out by “ritualistic practices” (2009, 209) seem a more appropriate account. Moreover, Lindenberg coherently analyzes the very category of public opinion in the GDR as meaningless, since it did not have a legitimate place, a public sphere, in the system. Information about what he calls “popular opinion” were channelled and gathered on terms determined by the communist party (Lindenberger 2009, 217–218). Still, there are vast differences among the conditions of these party-created and party-controlled channels.
Fulbrook (2005, 9) provides a useful list of channels of societal feedback that is based on tracing the responsiveness of authorities in her archival research. She names three most important systematic channels: public opinion surveys, reports (by the Secret police, various branches of the communist party at different levels, and by different member organizations of the National Front), and complaints. The opinion surveys as well as the reports were indirect and naturally controlled at both input and output, whereas complaints were initiated and produced by the population itself.
Public opinion surveys conducted by monopolistic organizations were tied closely to communist parties in both countries. Whereas the GDR’s Institute for Popular Opinion in Leipzig was directly bound to the Central Committee of the SED (Fulbrook 2005, 12), the Czechoslovak equivalent was formally part of the Academy of Sciences. Practically, as with all the “social-scientific” institutes at the Academy of Sciences, it was an “operative apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party” (Kaplan 1993a, 49). The various forms of reports were all gradually handed over to power centers at the Central committees of the communist parties, while the secret police reports were directly supplied to the General Secretary (Kaplan 1993a, 31; Fulbrook 1992; Dennis 2000).
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The most direct interaction between official authorities and individuals in direct complaints [stížnosti] (in the GDR Eingaben der Burger literally ‘Submission of Citizens’, i.e., letters of complaints. Eingaben are treated as a valuable source that has been used in the research program on the GDR already nearly for a decade (P. Becker and Lüdtke 1997). There has been an important discussion about the nature and quality of this source (cf. Zatlin 2007, 287; Mühlberg 2004; Betts 2010, 173– 175; Pence and Betts 2008; Major 2009, 20; Fulbrook 2009) and complaints in Czechoslovakia seemed to play similar role, there are no accounts of their magnitude, structure and “quality”. Moreover, their utilization in research of the communist regime is sporadic.11 The attention paid to the archive can also be illustrated by the fact that the Central committee for Control and Revision of the KSČ remains entirely unprocessed, i.e., unsorted and without a catalogue, and thus practically inaccessible (Národní archiv 1962). The same applies to the Výbor lidové kontroly (Council of Popular Control, that is, the supreme audit office with the power to rule over complaints the resolution of which has been challenged (Národní archiv 1967). However, the local archives occasionally keep the collections of complaints for local municipalities. Specific complaints concerning the allocation and its system could therefore be researched.
The barrier created by the precarious nature of complaints in Czechoslovakia could be overcome. General complaints made to the Czechoslovak office at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty could serve as a “compensation” for missing data. This channel has to be thoroughly analyzed, but as an initial probe suggests, the filter that prevented people in the 1970s and 1980s to call from their occupational phone station was not strict, given the number of calls and the variability of their content (Tomek 2010). The calls are accessible and transcribed.
11 One of the rare examples is Kabele’s work, but the part dealing with complaints is rather a taste of potential of this type of documents for research (Kabele 2003, 68–70). 58
Summary This chapter has outlined main challenges facing the proposed research. Turning to the relevant literature ranging from historiography to economics, I have situated the reasoning behind the construction of the research question and its operationalization. The research question is focused on the political function of social policy, and so the review began with a broad discussion on the functions of social policy as they were theorized by structural functionalists and radical scholars. These paradigms have some major shortcomings, but some of their methods are still being in occasional use, as I have shown with the consideration of research by Gans. The functional insight into social policy needs a firm conceptual substance suitable for the communist regimes. As I subsequently show, neither the communist welfare state nor welfare state concept as such provide a useful heuristic tool, and it might even be misleading. Particularly misleading is its guiding principle, as I argue on the prominent example of social rights. The lack of a suitable conceptual scheme leads me to borrow elements from the welfare system concept, and I opt for needs-based definition and establish the category of the social welfare domain, which possess higher generality compared to the welfare state. The following specification of the type of communist regime studied is opened by clarifying the term real-existing socialism, since there is no consensus about the characterization of the phase of communist regimes in the Central and Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Out of a myriad of existing theories or proto-theories explaining the ruling mechanisms of what I call real- existing socialism, the most notable or suitable ones were discussed and their potential for studying political functions of social policy was evaluated. Only isolated sources of inspirations were found. The potentially most viable theoretical alternative to my functional approach was treated separately. The social contract, or “new social contract”, as I argued, remains too general and it does not allow for a clear connection between the proposed contractual mechanism and its empirical manifestations, which makes it impractical for this research. Lack of reasonable theoretical foundations affirms the “building bloc” character of this thesis.
In order to conduct a detailed empirically founded research, housing policy was introduced as an applicable proxy for social policy in real-existing socialism. Its approachability as well as the fact that it formed one of the pronounced nominal social policies contributes to the convenience of taking it as a case for the social policy of real-existing socialism. Finally, a challenge to identify the source of data for the purpose of this research is touched upon. The top-down approach, present in most of the studies of policies of real-existing socialism could build upon relatively consensual understanding of the working of power center in Czechoslovakia. To balance the account of top-down approach
59 with some bottom-up inputs means an entry on the disputed terrain of state-society relationship in real-existing socialism. Due to the contentious character of this particular aspect of research, I have shortly reviewed the general discussion on the nature of state society-relationship in the Czechoslovakia. In the conclusion, the adoption of the perspective on limited but traceable input from society due to suppression of the public sphere leads to complaints (stížnosti or Eingaben) as the main source for the study of societal feedback to housing policy, be it the societal role in the construction of needs or the process of allocation.
Even though it has been argued here that most of the potential theories to study the social welfare domain in real-existing socialism are not useful for this research, some fragments were introduced so that the theoretical vacuum is not complete. The theoretical framework builds on the structural approach along the lines of structural functionalism of Parsons, Smelser and Mishra (Mishra 1977). Using their perspective, I employ the idea of social control by the means of social policy as the legitimating mechanism, following Gans’ use of the originally radical approach (1995; Gans 1972). My understanding of the communist regimes combines the general configuration described by Bunce (1999) and the typology developed by Kitschelt (1995; 1999). Finally, the insight into the principles of “buying loyalty” provided by the rational choice theorists, namely Wintrobe (2000; 2000), is utilized. As the research aims at theory building, it does not need to be built from scratch and at least these elements can be integrated.
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History of social welfare domain in the Czech territory12
Austrian-Hungarian roots The role of the state in the social welfare domain steadily evolved in the Czech territory as a part of the Habsburg monarchy from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In concrete terms, from 1785 it was the duty of the manorial nobility to care for the poor; in 1868, it became a matter of public administration (Tröster 2005, 27). Under the influence of Bismarck’s Germany, the ‘Taaffe reform’—named after Eduard Taaffe, prime minister of the Austrian half of the Habsburg monarchy (Cisleithanian)—was adopted in 1888–89. It included accident health insurance, health insurance for workers and labour protection.13 All schemes of the Cisleithanian part of the Austro- Hungarian Empire followed a strict principle of occupational classification with different conditions, and in fact were separate. Universal ambitions were absent and, as with the Bismarckian reforms, the primary goal was to appease radicalizing masses and lure away potential supporters of the social democratic movement. Both Bismarkian Germany and Taaffe’s Austria were non-democratic regimes with very limited suffrage, and some scholars identify the heavy stress on political legitimation and question the overall character of these reforms (Briggs 2000, 22–23; Cerami 2006a). Asa Briggs famously calls the intent behind Bismarckian reforms “subservience” and considers Bismarckian Sozialpolitik an “instrument of politics”“ and an “alternative to socialism” (2000, 23–24).
The Interwar Period Some features of the basic occupation-related insurance schemes prevailed throughout the Czechoslovak Republic established in 1918. The interwar democratic Czechoslovakia was, by 1925, one of the few European states with relatively complex social policies (Kárník 2003, 522). Rákosník provides an overview of the introduction of the major policy instruments of social security, beginning with accident insurance and health insurance 1888, old-age pension insurance in 1907, and unemployment insurance and family allowances in 1945 (2010, 277–285). Inglot summarizes that the incorporation of social protection in the first years of the interwar period in Czechoslovakia was “brilliant and strategic … [that functioned as] pillars of state and nation building (2008, 57).
12 This chapter is a revised version of introductory passages in (Ripka a Mares 2009).
13 More on Taafe reform in (Grandner 1996; Tröster 2005, 29–30). For an overview of the evolution of social welfare domain up to 1948 from the social liberal perspective, cf. Rákosník (2010, 175–259). 61
After introducing the eight-hour working day in 1918, the reform carried on with the enactment of the ‘Ghent system’, which imposed the responsibility for unemployment benefits on both the trade unions and the government Seeleib-Kaiser states, “[w]ithin the Ghent system financing and the provision of benefits depends on union membership and the unions administer the system” (2008,
10) (2008, 10). The separation of sector-related social security systems prevailed, but the social insurance system was relatively comprehensive, and from 1926 onwards it included old age pensions, disability pensions and sickness benefits, beginning from the third day of illness-related incapacity. The reason for keeping the system of diversified sector style insurance schemes and not replacing it with comprehensive, public insurance is usually ascribed to the strength and high mobilization of unions in large enterprises and to relative weakness of the Social Democratic Party after its heyday in the early years in government from 1918 till 1920 (Inglot 2008, 65).
The leitmotif of reforms can be paraphrased as ‘serious social reforms instead of social revolution,’ and the character of the regime was socially progressive, while social insurance proceeded along Bismarckian lines. The socially progressive elements of the welfare mix were universalistic social protection measures in housing, legal protection of workers, and unemployment benefits. Social care for the poor provided by the state, with its long tradition going back at least to Austrian-Hungarian legal measures from 1861 or 1868, was carried out in a liberal style, but prevailed in general till 1956. For more on the development of care for poor in Austrian-Hungarian empire, see Žilová (2006, 75– 78).
Nazi Occupation The interim period of the totalitarian regime under Nazi occupation used the method of incentives for the loyal ‘regime pillars’, such as workers in the armaments industry, while its potential (and actual) opponents were abridged of any social rights. The formerly fractioned labor unions, whose factions were associated with different political parties (mostly along the lines of Czech/German cleavage combined with Social democratic/Communist cleavage) (Luebbert 1987, 468–469). As with other areas of life in the interwar years, this was changed, or rather, simplified along lines that resemble the “de-pluralization” of the political party system. Out of three power centers— domestic resistance movement(s), the exile government in London, and the communist exile in Moscow—the domestic movement was the most influential in a programmatic sense in the field of social policy (cf. Rákosník 2010, 184–187; Kalinová 2004; M. Průcha 1988).
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The unified and Nazi-controlled National Center of Employees provided a basis for consolidation. First, this body was dominated by Social Democrats promoting a comprehensive social democratic welfare system; later, the balance shifted to the adherents of the Communist party. Similarly, the first wave of mass underground resistance movement was led by Social Democrats, which was, to some extent, covertly connected to the National Center for Employees. This movement produced a document entitled “Za svobodu do nové československé republiky” (For Freedom for the New Czechoslovak Republic), that according to Rákosník not only foreshadowed the upcoming programmatic texts of the post-war period, but also surpassed them in quality and depth. The key elements of the program in the field of social and economic policy included universal and mandatory social insurance, the right to work with its “duty to work dimension”, strong emancipatory family policies, and the key role of state in industry and economy as a whole (Rákosník 2010, 186). The Social Democratic influence decreased due to a wave of arrests and executions in 1941–1942. A boost to the expansive tendencies of the welfare system was provided by the Beveridge report, where Keynesian policies and ambitious social policies were set and became a worldwide inspiration. Able-Smith states that "the report advocated family allowances, a free health service and full employment, and that all social insurance benefits should be at flat rate and at subsistence level with the aim of abolishing poverty." (1992, 5; cf. Beveridge 1942). However, the shift of power in this social policy trust from social democrats to communists did not radically alter programmatic plans stemming from these centers, but it remained key for the post-war power game (Deken 1994, 20– 25).
Post-war “Socializing Democracy” The system established after the end of the WWII is generally called the “new social democratic model”(Inglot 2008, 70), or, using the label of that time, “popular democratic model” in scholarly literature. To Rákosník's task, to highlight the aspects of continuity between the pre-communist and communist system features corresponds his "popular democracy" stretching to the period of 1945- 1958/1960 (Rákosník 2010, 71–76). After the Second World War, the Czechoslovak government was based on a wide new consensus departing radically from the pre-war social and political order. President Beneš called it himself “socializing democracy” as opposed to “bourgeois democracy” (Beneš 1946, 262) of the interwar period(Abrams 2005, 282). On the other hand, the leader of the Communist party called it "revolutionary democracy" by 1945 (Rupnik 2002, 207). Key pillars of the pre-war system were called into question, while the new structures, especially in the field of social
63 policy, were defined in a very general way (Abrams 2005, 132). A major document determining the post-war policies, the so called Košický vládní program (Košice Government Program), set the goals for social policy in a non-specific egalitarian manner, claiming responsibility for implementation of a “generous social policy and social care” (Národní fronta Čechů a Slováků 1945). Though the cornerstone of the Beveridge-style shift came only in 1948 with a law on “national insurance” (Arnoldová 2004, 81), marked shifts from tradition of the interwar period towards etatism and control affected most areas of the welfare system. The most involved party in the agenda setting and framing of this expansive and egalitarian universalistic measure were social democrats. Still, due to the timing and its political skills, it was the Communist party that claimed the credit for its enactment.14
The legal provisions for workers made use of most of the legislation from the Nazi occupation period. The war economy and the Nazi occupation regime had a very specific conception of the right to work and of the role of the bureaucratic apparatus in the distribution of the workforce (Rákosník 2010, 81– 82). The stress on workers as bearers of certain rights and most of entitlements also included number of duties for workers (and the powers of the administration) that deviated sharply from the conception of one’s right to choose one’s occupation and job. Večerník’s term “obligatory right to work” (1992, 62) highlights the character of this duty-right. The ownership rights, as I show in the respective chapter, also failed to return to their liberal constitutional state after the Nazi occupation. The replacement of the concept of citizenship with the concept of worker, a process present among all the Soviet bloc countries, was not only a matter of jargon, but rather a profound semantic transformation. For reflections on the meaning of this change, Heinen (1997) or Offe (1996).
Making an economy socialist It is important to stress that the meaning of a widely-spread slogan associated with the basis of socializing democracy was “the democratization of economic life”. The meaning, once again open and intangible, was still taking shape within the measures toward abrupt redistribution of wealth. Nationalization, confiscation or de-facto expropriation of property15 and physical expulsion of German inhabitants, whose citizenship was already called into question officially by the Košice government programme (Národní fronta Čechů a Slováků 1945), were all part of a process that had
14 The law č. 99/1948 Sb. was finally enacted just two months after the communist turnover in February 1948. 15.4.2012. (cf. Rákosník 2010, 252 and ; Zákon o národním pojištění 1948) 15 My understanding of these concepts follows current international law (Comeaux a Kinsella 1997). 64 only a few vocal public opponents. The impact of these measures on the social welfare domain could be traced not only in the comprehension of civic rights including property rights,16 but also in the radical transformation of allocation of material possession. In other words, the rise of newly expanded “national property” influenced the distribution of incomes at least as strongly as the measures of the nominal social policy, particularly social security.
The seizure of power by the Communists in 1948 altered these earlier attempts to significantly change the Bismarckian scheme.17 A mix of radical socialist ideas together with specific form of nationalism and a fixed foreign orientation to the USSR dominated until 1948. Following the communist coup, it was gradually replaced by Marxist-Leninist theory and practice. The general frame of Marxism-Leninism did not directly constitute a set of prescriptions for social policy and housing, but rather established highly generalized principles. However, the translation of some of these principles had profound and tangible influence on the conception of the welfare domain and its prioritization. The prioritization can be illustrated by using the example of accounting principles. The Soviet invention of Material Production System (MPS), as opposed to the elsewhere valid System of National Accounts, does not only lead to the incompatibility of macroeconomic data that result in highly problematic East-West comparisons based largely on crude estimates; it is also, as with all accounting and statistical prescriptions, ideologically loaded. The MPS lies basically in the distinction between productive and non-productive activities, where only productive activities are measured in the key quantities of social product and national income (net material product). This peculiarity is not just technical, since it reflects the Marxian conception of value, where consumption of services is merely a secondary distribution of national income (Kornai 1992, 195–196). In the now more comprehensible and prevailing GDP as a measure within the System of National Accounts, services are included. As Kornai shows, the consequences are not solely the incomparability and the tendency to overvalue the “growth of economy”, even if recalculations to the GDP are made. The MPS system also inherently brings key for prioritization of the “production” and creates a “natural” pressure to push services away. This inevitably leads to shrinking of the social welfare domain, because it largely does not create or add to what is valued. The production sphere with tangible material goods had indisputably investment priority over services (Kornai 1992, 172).
16 Which even created a label for the housing model history (Hegedüs a Tosics 1996). 17 Whereas Cerami (2006b) argues for strong presence of Bismarkian elements, Inglot (2008) calls the process layering, rather than a change. 65
Social transformation in the communist regime up to 1968 The key steps towards social transformation are situated mostly into the years 1949–1953 (V. Průcha 2008, 592). Pavel Machonin, one of the leading Marxist analysts of stratification process in Czechoslovak society, derives his periodization of the pre-1968 period from configuration of processes of social stratification. Even before the coup in 1948, the state inclined to a “working- professional status based on participation in material production” (Machonin 2005, 110), which he sees as a key aspect of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship was naturally facilitated by the seizure of power in 1948, but its prerequisites were being laid down from at least 1945. Unlike Machonin sees another totalitarian-bureaucratic model within the political and organizational role as the dominant status as a possibility only after the stabilization of power after the coup, but Rákosník (2010) offers a more convincing story of strong administrative powers from at least the late 1930s. The difference stems not just from different disciplines, but from radically divergent interpretations of the post-1945 social and political processes. This brings Rákosník’s explanation close to the famous new class-nomenclature by Milovan Djilas (1977). The nivelization strategy, which disconnected the working performance from the income, was so successful that it made Czechoslovakia one of the most egalitarian countries by the 1960s (Machonin 2005, 116) Kornai even illustrates that the extreme egalitarian nature made Czechoslovakia a country with the lowest Gini coefficient in the developed world in 1973 with a value of 0.19 (1992, 318). Inferring from Machonin’s analysis, it redefined the dominant social group to benefit from the system to “consumers”, and more precisely to “unqualified and underperforming ‘consumers’” (2005, 114, 121).
Did these stratification principles, set by the ruling Communist party, make the communist regime more stable? A comparative view on the depth of the social transformation along these principles allows one to agree with the now dominant answer on the relative stability and “social peace” in pre- 1968 Czechoslovakia. A symbolic question in this respects aims at answering the inexistence of political turmoil around the mid-1950s in Czechoslovakia. Most reliable answers turn to economic, or socio-economic, reasons for what Muriel Blaive calls “political docility” (2013) is the relatively high living standards and the egalitarian distribution of incomes, the redistribution of which mainly benefited the working class, especially its manual worker’s subset.18 Reasons for reservations about unanimous and passive support of the working class are well documented by Heumos (Heumos 2006)
18 Blaive's argument about the relatively prosperous Czechoslovakia, that benefited from its welathy departure point in 1948, does not sufficiently take into account the redistributive mechanisms (cf. Blaive 2005). 66
The meaning of the system of centrally set wages and prices does not have a straightforward theoretical interpretation regarding its social function. The fact that the nationalization of economy was accomplished by and large by 1960 implies that all working people became employees of the state.
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The offer of Normalization19
Methodological nexus Political crises create great material for study that allows a thorough and apt view on the basis of new, post-crisis systems. It is common among scholars of communist regimes to build their probes into different phases of the communist regime using a comparative view on the way the winners of a particular crisis coped with the post-crisis period, or to put it differently, to study the strategy of their victory and its endurance. This winning tactic usually marks the way toward the strategy of retaining power later. New legitimacy is born with this strategy of post-crisis political management. As I have noted earlier, the legitimacy should not be confused with Weberian “strong legitimacy”. It is rather, following Dogan’s and Pakulski’s (1986; 1992) concept of “quasi-legitimacy” with the threat of Soviet interference contradicting the normative conception of legitimacy by Habermas, a “situation when binding decisions can be made independently of the manifest threat of sanctions and promises or rewards.”20
As we have seen in the literature review, some scholars use metaphorics of social contract to depict the mechanism of achieving his quasi-legitimacy. Though the social contract is rarely applied specifically in the welfare domain in communist states, and despite its pitfalls, it is helpful because of its relative clarity.
A reading of the crucial texts of normalization that are publicly accessible shows that two of the key indigenous concepts are životní úroveň ‘living standards’ a sociální jistoty ‘social certainties’. In this section, I shall discuss the “indigenous” understanding or definitions, because they are key to the understanding and self-understanding of the social welfare domain. The essential role of the welfare domain during normalization in Czechoslovakia has been stressed a number of times (Kaplan 1993b, 61; Otáhal 2002; Kalinová 2012), but the way this sector was offered to the population by the Communist party and the government, and the way it became so prominent, still remain partially unexplained.
For this reason, I have gathered the crucial documents of the public normalization endeavor. The set is bounded in terms of time by the statement of policy of the “second” Štrougal government from 17 December 1971 (Vláda ČSSR 1971). It includes policy statements by all the post-1968 governments, speeches by the president of Czechoslovakia Ludvík Svoboda (Vondrová 2010a), and it also includes
19 This section is based on my previously published text (Ripka 2012). 20 (Citation of Habermas in Pakulski 1986, 47; Habermas 1975, 101) 68 the referential programmatic statement of normalization, Poučení z krizového vývoje ve straně a společnosti po XIII. Sjezdu KSČ [‘Lessons to be Drawn from the Crisis in the Party and in Society after the XIII Congress of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’] (Slouka 1988). In order to understand the shift, I use the Akční program KSČ [‘Action programme of the CP’] ÚV KSČ 1968) as a template of the reformist “point of departure”. I analyzed these texts especially according to the changes in the semantic field of “living standards” and “social certainties” or “life certainties.21
Proof of the powerful entry of the welfare domain into the public space is the frequency of “certainties” and their most frequent concordance (“life” followed by “social”) as documented by the “Totalita” corpus, which captures the years 1952, 1969 and 1977. Especially striking is the dynamic of “social certainties” (1952-0/1969-3/1977-74) (Čermák, Cvrček, and Schmiedtová 2010). As I have described earlier, the social welfare domain, or even social policy as a term, was suppressed by an outright ideological campaign after 1948 and it gave place to the economic policy (cf. Kalinová 2007; V. Průcha 2008; Ripka 2011; Haggard and Kaufman 2008). However, the attempts to revive its position in the public arena preceded the liberalization attempts of the reforms of the late 1960s. It is thus useful to compare the conception of the welfare domain in the reformist endeavor so that the possible changes or shifts might be revealed.
The Action programme of the Communist Party after April 1968 incorporates some of the narrative elements that are, simply reproduced later in the normalization period. Analytical figure of battles won in the war for the “basic social certainties” (ÚV KSČ 1968) that should be the “result of the building of socialism“ (ÚV KSČ 1968) is an enduring constant in 1970s and 1980s. The stress here is put on the basic nature of these certainties. Though it is respectable and important so far, it still remains basic. On the contrary, the living standards at this time are decreasing as a logical consequence of mistakes in management, orientation of industry, etc. The forward-looking passages are carefully balanced egalitarianism and leveling are both negative, since they create an “obstacle in the improvement of living standards” (ÚV KSČ 1968). If the document speaks about lifting price regulation, it immediately associates it with the solution to “the most pressing problems of social policy.” Every step leading to liberalization and decentralization is followed by a reference to living standards or a jointly proposed compensation in the form of expansion of social security. To summarize, living standards (and the potential to increase it) are the main frame with which the
21 The choice of the key texts is problematic, particularly taking the Action programme as a referential point. Living standards are becoming a widely recognized social problem already by the late 1950s. The symbol of this turn is the establishment of a commission on Living standards in September 20, 1963 [Komise ÚV KSČ pro otázky životní úrovně z 20.9.1963]. 69 reforms were “sold”. In reform discourse, steps in social security played a role of differentiated and targeted compensation of the consequences of the liberalization steps.
After the invasion, the semantic field of certainties became much less clear, since difference between stability, security, certainty and order became blurred, all referring to the basic human needs and points of reference. Retaining the basic order, security and in a sense maintaining one’s own life in the occupation became the primary goal.
The shorter public texts published immediately after the occupation are understandably concerned with current peace and consolidation in the sense of public order. Consolidation and normalization is meant to be the present program at the time, as we can see in the speech of Alexandr Dubček, broadcast on 27 August 1968 on public radio (Macek and Prečan 1990, 301–306). However, this stabilization or stability is already called a precondition to retaining the achievements of socialism in this broadcast. Dubček aims at a “more prosperous development of socialism” in the spirit of the post-January path. The figure of necessary precondition, known especially in its iconic declaration of the “peace to work” [klid na práci], is repeatedly reoccurring in various forms during normalization. If the normalization discourse includes plenty of metaphors of disorientation, bewitchment and derangement, certainties becomes a guiding beacon, a horizon, a purpose of the course. It is particularly visible on the texts of policy program of governments, which are homogenous in terms of genre. All texts from this period up to the third Štrougal government, which began on 17 December 1971, include more concordances of certainties. The usual “social certainty” is supplemented by “political certainty”, “legal certainty” and “life certainty”. The meaning of certainties is still very wide in the beginning of the third Černík government; the implicit managing is denoted mostly negatively by reference to what “the previous developments have upset,” and Černík’s statement of policy declares vaguely that the government is going to consolidate the [disrupted] “certainty about perspectives of our socialist development.” (Vláda ČSSR 1969b). This search for meaning is encompassed by a much more comprehensible and synoptic frame story, since it includes a historicizing perspective.
The interim period was marked by blurred concepts that reveal the process of finding new language, or more precisely new meaning. The lessons are, in terms of their ambitions and level of sophistication, on at least the same level as the Action Program. The policy statement of Černík’s government also speaks about the “basic political and economic certainties”. Especially marked here is the character of these certainties as “revolutionary achievements”. This basis is, however, far less established, and so it requires defense. Moreover, certainties become associated with their 70 guarantor, the USSR. In the Lessons, it is declared that “having learned lessons from the bitter past, we are going to keep a wary eye on the saint legacy of the progressive forces of our nation and also the alliance with the Soviet Union, a guarantor of our national and social certainty and the certainty of our statehood.” (Slouka 1988).
Social certainty is became precondition for more substantial goals, typically a contentful life. As Kalinová states, "The social certainty, that was created for the working people in our socialist country, is one of the main preconditions of a contentful human life." (Kalinová 2012, 87). New understanding of certainty was built on the background of the constructed, but in part also experienced liberalizing changes in areas of prices, planning of production, and wages that contributed to the increase in prices and costs of living in general. Whether it was the freezing of prices, the increase of wages, or changes in social security measures, this understanding became steadily stated in more concrete terms. All of these changes were already a direct interpretation of the normalization understanding of “social certainties.”
It is important to refer here to the aforementioned roots of the welfare measures of normalization. So called Social Program was never officially certified as such by the Communist party, but in August 1969, it was passed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the government22 as an internal strategic document. Although the Social Program was prepared by reformists, and, apart from its name and status, its content was not altered too much, it was still created as a measure complementary to the economic reform. Its new context, where the economic reform was, by and large, called off and measures such as the price moratorium entirely changed, its meaning and social impact understandably transformed as well.
The original function—to pillow the expected social consequences of the economic reform —simply disappeared (cf. Kaplan 1993b). It is difficult to determine the level to which keeping the changes in social policy was more a matter of deliberate strategic use of social compensation (Kalinová 2012, 81–90) or whether it was a residual measure, the abolishment of which the normalizing winners did not possess enough power (cf. Vondrová 2010b, 16). I am inclined to agree with Kalinová’s strategic use because of one of the key intra-party documents: the Statement of Reasons at the Narodohospodářská komise ÚV KSČ (Economic Committee of the Central Committee of the
22 Usnesením vlády ČSSR ze dne 27. Srpna 1969. 71
Communist Party), which was a measured affirmation of the Social Program that includes awareness of its new context. It directly acknowledges its new connection to “economic consolidation.” (Štancel 1969). Apart from that, it states that “the satisfaction of social needs creates an important motivational momentum and should become one of the important grounds for economic activity,” (Štancel 1969, 3) which departs from the reformist plans for the role of social policy.
The fact that the Social Program—or, more precisely, most elements thereof (Štancel 1969, 5)— remained part of the sociopolitical program of normalization created a strain in the form of allotopy.23 The decision not to refer to the Social Program as such, but to make use of certain/specific elements, is a solution that eliminated the allotopical situation in public. Another question, which is beyond the reach of this study, is the consequence of the allotropy in the power centers. A hint at the results might be found in the strategies of public substantiation of the “healthy core” of cadres that stayed in power. It might not be surprising, that the person in charge of preparation of the Social Program, Michal Štancel,24 became the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs after its re-establishment in April 1968, and stayed in the same post until 1983. These strategies of “separating the wheat from the chaff” were multilayered and began with identification of just 165,000 members of “screening committees.” (Maňák 1997). They began at the highest ranks of the Communist party and in the media, and ended with the most profound purge within the membership of the Communist party in the Communist bloc and the symbolic cleansing of the disloyal elements through most of the public services.
Also, the connection to the changes of price policy are explicitly named as complementary to these proposed measures (Štancel 1969, 4), so the consequences and the changed context were known. The situation resembles the GDR after the transition of power to Honnecker in 1971.
Since this question is crucial for our research question, it will be posed in the case of housing policy again and the answer shall be discussed in the concluding chapters. In opposition to Vondrová (2003; 2010b; 2010b) and Kalinová (2012; 1998), I follow Barach and Bahratz’s (1962; 1963; 1975) approach by including a consideration of non-decision as an important element of the decision-making process
23 In semantics, allotopy means two contradicting stories within one text. An opposite are two congruent stories that create isotopy. 24 It seems that the name was misspelled at the statement of reason for the Social program (Štancl) (Štancel 1969, 5). 72 and policy creation, even if this approach does not immediately lead to straightforward answers. Also, interpretation of non-decision might be puzzling, but it usually enormous potential to attest to the network of power relations in society.
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The Headquarters and their operation
The answer to the question about the function of policy inevitably leads to the policy-making process, the key policy actors, and ultimately to the structure of power in real-socialism. Despite the differences among Central and Eastern European communist regimes, we could make use of the insight into the governing structure of what Janos Kornai (1992) calls “classical socialism”,25 and also the apt analysis of the party-state by Maria Csanádi (1997). As I have previously shown, the now controversial and questioned state-centered approaches are far more applicable to what is called a party-state polity than to liberal democracies. The reason for adoption of a state (party) centered model, which is largely being abandoned due to acknowledgement of others, e.g. the private sector, definitely does not mean that the party-state could be left from further examination. The so-called power group (mocenská skupina) could not be, for many reasons, a sufficient answer. First, the party-state system, though hierarchic, should not be seen as a monolithic unitary structure. It is far more appropriate to describe it as two interdependent hierarchies consisting of the party and the state. Though the two hierarchies are not simply parallel, the general dominance of the party is undeniable. However, both the party and the state consist of many interdependent levels, and it is structured both horizontally and vertically. This fact applies to the state structures, which is connected to the party on number of levels. These relations are analyzed and described on Czechoslovak normalization regime in more depth below.
Secondly, apart from the power center, there were number of “fringe” organizations. Looking at the field from the official perspective of that time, these mass organizations were independent and they were highly involved in the policy process, though their role and their dependence, especially through the propaganda system, is questionable. Still, as we could see on the moments of crisis in 1968—1969, these mass organizations could form an alternative to the power center, if the space for their rise in power was open.
Thirdly, the policy process, despite the limited applicability of classic models, could not fully escape the fundamental principles of any political system. There are some inputs (though free and fair elections are not among those), and the process itself includes implementation and finally, appears as feedback. The decision making phase could be, as has been said previously, located at the
25 As opposed to the other three prototypes: “revolutionary-transitional system“ and “reform socialism“ in (Kornai 1992, 19–20) 74 headquarters of the Communist party, but both the input, the output and the feedback brings all the other levels of the party-state into the game.
Moreover, if the output could generally be traced through legislation and some general data like statistics, the input is far more puzzling. In an environment where the ultimate feedback and input from the elections and interest groups or civil society is absent, where there is problematic notion of public opinion (and its surveying thus even more so), on what grounds does the CP decide? And likewise, on what grounds are policies altered? Simple reference to ideology does not suffice; although Marxism-Leninism was important, it was not by any means the ultimate and only factor. It is evident that a deeper probe into the mechanism of power and policy making is needed in order to understand the meaning of the housing policy in Czechoslovakia.
The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia underwent serious changes in its internal structure. If the earlier phases of its inner functioning and development are relatively well documented, the 1970s and 1980s are still under-researched. The formal structure did not alter dramatically from the 1960s, despite the federalization following a change in constitution in 1968 (and the following amendment internal acts). Though some of the moves in 1969–1971 were motivated by internal struggles and an aim to decrease the power of reformist before they were pushed out of the party completely, the basic structure and the power relations more or less remained in the same state as in the 1960s. That is why I choose to build on the insight of Karel Kaplan(1993a) and Vondrová (2003). By no means could this thesis build on comprehension comparable to the level to which GDR’s Communist party structure and operation is analyzed in general (cf. Dennis 2000; Fulbrook 1997; Fulbrook 2009; Major 2009; Weber 2004) or in specific fields of economic policy and politics (cf. Madarász 2003; Rowell 2001; Steiner 2004; Zatlin 2007) or in housing policy (cf. Rowell 2008; Buck 2004; Rueschemeyer 1990). Still, even these studies offer inspiration for approaches to the analysis of the power structure as well as the channeling of information, i.e. the policy process in real-existing socialism.
The highest body of the Communist party was its congress. Held every 5 years, in synchrony with the five-year plan, it determined the basic line of the party for the upcoming five-year period. Its passed resolutions, and keynote speeches became a point of reference for both the party and state administration. The hierarchy of the Communist party, if we start from below, consisted first of party 75 organization within workplaces (závodní stranická organizace), local councils of the party (místní organizace), district organization (okresní organizace/obvodní organizace/městská organizace), regional council (krajská organizace) and the republic council (following the 1968 federalization reform). On the federal level, the headquarters were called the Central Committee (Ústřední výbor, i.e., the Central Committee of the Communist Party) and its internal structures possessed the most important powers; it was the supreme body of the party between congresses. The congress should have, in theory, played role of a check vis-à-vis the enormous power of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (henceforth CCCP), but in fact, it was not more than a vehicle of the power group (Pešek 2004, 28). The CCCP was divided into departments and commissions. It consisted of between 10 and 20 deputies elected at each party congress. The CCCP held 2 to 7 sessions annually, and its activities were a prepared presidium of the CCCP (henceforth PCCCP; otherwise known as the Politbyro; it held the actual name of Politbyro only until 1962) (cf. Štverák 2010). Its agenda included, for example, ideological declarations (such as approval of the team for new edition of Marx writings).
In the 1970s and 1980s, it had around 120 members and 50 candidates for membership, all elected at the congress of the party (Komunistická 1984). At the forefront of the party stood the general secretary (though in the years 1953–1972, the official name was first secretary). This functionary had the right to preside over the PCCCP, CCCP, and the congress. From the beginning of the “hot phase of normalization” in April 1969, Gustáv Husák, a final26 favorite of the USSR, held this post until 1987, when he was replaced by Miloš Jakeš. The first or general secretary had unique access to the center in the USSR, where he regularly checked his position and the fundamental course of domestic politics and policies, both in their content and their “staffing” (“cadre work” in the official jargon of the communist regime).
There are no deeper studies focused on the power relations between secretariat and the PCCCP, as for the GDR, where the power relations and characteristics of each member of the PCCCP and the secretariat are relatively well known. Limited advancement of inventorying of the documents of the CC CP allows us only to make sketches of power the power group and inner processes within the headquarters compared to the picture drawn by Karel Kaplan (1993a) for the years 1948–1968. Still, some “mechanical” considerations could be made.
26 Husák’s selection was a matter of later compromise, after earlier nominees of more radical hardliners became unviable. 76
The power group recruited among the PCC, especially from its operative “secretariat”. The secretariat remained the most stable formation of functionaries. Also, it had in hand the highest power to interpret and realize the decisions made by the power group. Among the communist regimes in the region, the Czechoslovak (and especially the Czech portion of the) headquarters of the Communist Party became the most stable, or as Grzymala-Busse (2002, 37–40) puts it, the most stagnating. Most of the changes within the politburo (and power group) were results of the aging of the members.27
As we can see in some of the key decisions by the PCCCP, for example, the restructuring the commissions after the first congress (the fourteenth overall) of the normalization era, the fundaments were even set by the first secretary and his aides orally.28 In general, changes to the standing order of the CCCP proposed after the 14th Congress of the Communist Party in 1971 proclaimed sharp decrease of openness and reversed even the smallest signs of inner liberalization. It declared to prepare “conditions for a serene and objective meetings” of the CCCP by calling off changes, such as the possibility of a secret vote, an obligation to include relevant opinions from the public in the discussions, and a duty to spread the information about the agenda of a meeting to lower echelons of the CP in advance (ÚV 24.8.1971).
The daily operation of the PCCCP and the secretariat consisted of the highest orders for the party and for the state administration, including ministries and the government. All important legal and policy documents were the first order to be drafted in general by the PCCCP to the respective commission and department of the CCCP. Kaplan divides the departments to three groups: political, ideological and economic. The commissions were established by either the PCC or the CCCP. The structure of departments and committees often changed according to “tasks that the party was dealing with at the particular time”.29
27 The composition of politburo changed at a mean pace of 13% a year, a dynamic less than twice lower than in Poland. The only exception is 1968, when about half of the members changed, and 1970-1971, when the rest of the reformists were pushed out (Grzymala-Busse 2002, 39). 28 The structure of the commissions was prescribed orally to the PCC of the CP by Gustav Husák and were passed, virtually unchanged on August 27, 1971 (PÚV KSČ 1971).
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In the 1960s, the commissions had about 40 members, and 7–14 members were part of the management of the commission. The topicality of some of the commissions, the “control freakiness,” and some lack of order of the CCCP could be illustrated by the example of the Supply and Provision Commission established in 1948. Later, it was divided into the Commission on Flour Supply and a Commission of Fruits and Vegetables in 1951 and 1950 respectively. More importantly, some wider and more serious of the pronounced problems or policy priorities were addressed by specific commissions. The social welfare domain included the Social Political Committee, established in 1945, later changed to the Social-Political Council in 1948, which, in practice, was under supervision of the economic committee. In the years following the crisis of Stalinism, a Committee on Living Standards Issues was established in 1954 and lasted just one year. Following the proposed solution to the “housing problem” (se chapter “The Housing document”), a specific Committee for the Resolution of the Housing Problem existed from 1960 to 1962. In 1963, a more systematic approach to commissions of the CC was established, and the structure remained basically more or less valid, with clear distinction between temporary and stable commissions.
For the normalization period, we may draw on the structure of departments and commissions from 1971 (PÚV KSČ 1971):
ideological
economic (národohospodářská)
agricultural
for the work with youth
The ideological departments were responsible for propaganda, agitation, educational system, culture and mass media. Political departments were in charge of government (and the entire administration), mass organizations and local administration, and also international affairs. The economic departments oversaw industry, living standards, planning and finances and agriculture. The department of state administration was finally in charge of security forces including secret police and armed forces.
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The leading role of the party The leading role of the party, with its legal basis established by a general declaration in the Constitution of 1960, was not an empty phrase, but rather a code name for monopoly on power. Beside the important personal interconnectedness on the highest levels, with the president and general secretary being in one person for most of the 42 years, there were more general mechanisms securing the leading role on all levels. As Csanádi aptly points out, there were four main principles or mechanisms that enabled this performance of the leading role:
1. cadre authority (the nomenclature system [kádrová nomenklatura]);
2. the system of topical responsibilities (resort system [rezortní oddělení, systém tajemníků]);
3. the area responsibilities (instructor system);
4. the party discipline (Csanádi 1997, 6–14).
The cadre authority of the party meant control over personal staffing of positions that were assumed to be crucial for the functioning of the regime. The definition of the set of posts, whose staffing was subordinated to the decision of various levels of the CP, was included in a document called “cadre order” (kádrový pořádek), and the posts were called cadre nomenclature (kádrová nomenklatura). This system was partly replaced by semi-closed competitions with in the CP, giving the party organs only final approval from the early 1960s. In 1968, the role of the “cadre order” decreased significantly. A new document stipulating the positions was not prepared until 1969, which brought temporary liberalization of the process with partial withdrawal of rigid party control (Cajthaml, 205). The return of the rigid “cadre order” in the years 1970–1972 meant a firm grip on power, since the PCCCP made ultimate decisions about key positions in the party, in state administration, in corporations and other posts including ideologically high-profile posts in academia.
The total number of these posts under the immediate power of the CCCP was in constant flux with the advent of normalization, but it peaked in 1988. This contradicts the usual conception of partial
79 de-politicizing of economic posts in the late 1980s.30 The overall number of posts decided on by all levels of the party was about 200,000, which the party organs decided on directly; and about 350,000 posts where the party organs were “merely consulted” (meaning they had the most important say, at least in the form of veto power). Both these categories amounted to about 720,000 posts by 1984 (Pešek 2004, 36). Another wave of liberalization came just at the end of the 1980s with the process of reconstruction (přestavba), but Petr Cajthaml argues that its seemingly democratization nature was doomed to failure due to its complicated nature (Cajthaml, 209). The disadvantage of this distinctively centralized system that gave the upper echelons of the party great powers in most areas of life was that it also brought an enormous number of administrative steps that consumed a considerable amount of capacity of the CCCP.
The system of topical responsibilities is likened to shadowing of the state administration, including ministries and parliamentary bodies. This is an underestimation. Even if the apparatus of the CCCP was several times smaller than the state administration, all important steps were repeatedly consulted and practically decided by the CCCP and its inner parts. Direct orders from the CCCP to the government and parliament, as well as the system of periodical checks, both reveal that the role of the CCCP could not be considered only as a veto point (Tsebelis 2011), but also as the ultimate decision making center with a firm grip over the legislative and executive process. As we shall see in the case of housing policy, the framing as well as concrete steps were based on the will of the CCCP.
The implementation of policy was not only up to the cadres, but also a matter of the party organization in the workplace. Usually, it created a personal union or some type of overlap, while the instructions of higher hierarchical levels were far more binding than the policy of management. The housing policy was not an exception, and calls to workplace organizations were frequent part of the message of the CCCP.
Finally, the most important formal body to carry out procedures to encourage party discipline was the Central Review and Inspection Commission (Ústřední kontrolní a revizní komise, henceforth CRIC). Complaints in party matters were addressed and theimplementation of party measures was carried out regularly, and a bi-annual reports (and extensive reports at each party congress) on the
30 The rise from initial 4297 positions in May 1969 through 1970 and 1978- 8466 to peaked in 1988 at 10033 positions under direct control (Pešek 2004, 35). 80 result of these controls were an integral part of the party life. The CRIC became very prominent with the advent of normalization, since the purges of members of the party, with over one quarter being expelled for insufficient loyalty, was overseen by it. The head of this committee was Miloš Jakeš, who was a general secretary from 1988.
After the reformists were expelled, the power relations within the power group were, divided between a group of “pragmatics”, headed by Husák and Štrougal, and a group of “conservatives” (otherwise called “dogmatics”), with Vasil Bilak31 and Miloš Jakeš as the informal leaders. The group of the ultra-leftist conservatives was gradually pushed to the fringe (Urbášek 2006).
The fact that the intra-party documents and directions of the CCCP and its parts had far greater power than official legislation and measures carried out by the government could be exemplified by a report of the CRIC from 3 March 1972, which stated that “[m]any citizens are not turning to the higher organs of the state administration, believing that, if the party is the leading force in the state, it can directly overturn the decisions made by state administration.” 32 Though the CRIC admitted that the CP is not omnipotent, it also used the term “directly” to stress that the misunderstanding is only in the way the monopoly of power is carried out, not in the sole fact of its existence.
Since the full analysis complicated structure of the CP’s reign is far beyond the scope of this thesis, very limited attention is paid to mass organizations, such as Revolutionary Union Movement (Revoluční odborové hnutí), which was a monopolistic organization with over 90% of working population as members. Its rise to power in 1968–1969 was blocked and reversed by normalization, which made made it once again a fully dependent structure. As with the other existing political parties, it was fully subordinate to and personally interlinked with the power center. Though the role of these organizations rose in the late 1980s and they become important, their formal separateness contributed to their potential in a changing polity.
31 Vasil Biľak was, for a time, a favourite of the USSR. The likes of Soviets shifted to Husák, while Biľak, formarly ultraleftist conservative, left part of his allies and became informal head of the dogmatic wing in the CP. (Urbášek 2006) Pešek, Štruktúry moci na Slovensku 1948, 36. 32 38/39, k info 1; including housing problems and criminal court decisions 81
State administration The power of the party excluded much autonomy of the parliamentary bodies and executive branch. All the levels, including the municipality, were not only non-autonomous, but were also personally tied by the penetration of the party organizations within themselves. Party committees were power centers on each level, while the heads of most organizations, whether members of the party or not, were always decided on by the CP through the system of nomenclature described above. The multiple layered system of controls and checks does not mean that all the levels were under the same rule and supervision.
The levels of state administration were arranged in a strict hierarchy, but federalization brought about changes that added another strand of hierarchy. The process of federalization was included partial decentralization of powers from Czechoslovak level to the level of national,33 Czech and Slovak governments. While the federal level kept exclusive purview over foreign affairs, defense, and monetary policy, the financial an planning issues as well as welfare issues became a matter of a shared domain among federal and national governments (Schelle 2009, 189–197). The process of federalization was completed by 1971 with the introduction of federal organs of the state administration
The functioning of system of control was limited not just by the aforementioned complexity and the resulting laboriousness of its operation. It was also weakened by competing party strands and factions, regional power of technocratic elite in corporations and also by the quality of information on which decisions could be based at the power center. In spite of its robustness, the system was failing to meet its ambitions in the areas of implementation, especially due to lack of feedback and enormous demands on coordination, as I will show/will be shown.
The power struggles are not easy to trace, but some illustrious examples are given in the section on regional functioning of the housing policy. Despite the practical inaccessibility of some of the archival funds relevant to the channels of information, the inspection of these channels, both in an applied sense in housing policy, and in the evaluation of their quality and the logic of their functioning can offer some illustrious evidence.
33 The level to which effective decentralization occured after 1970 is still a matter of scholarly debate (cf. Žatkuliak 1998; Kirschbaum 1993; Cox a Frankland 1995). 82
DIAGRAM 1: The hierarchical structure of the party-state
Source: Author inspired by Csanádi (1997).
As we could see on the diagram 1, there are numerous controls and checks, and some of the functions necessarily overlap with others, especially the system of checks and controls. In general, doubling of hierarchy leads to question of efficiency of this type of seeming redundancy that 83 inevitably causes contradictions and conflicts within the apparatus. The best available answer is given by Kornai, who assumes that the main reason is a mutual low level of confidence between a superior and his subordinates. This enormous suspicion leads, according to Kornai, to multiplying of the elements so that, in the case of the malfunction of one element, the risk is pooled and collapse prevented (Kornai 1992, 99).
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Governing model of the Real Existing Socialism
Though we have stated that the classical tools of policy analysis are not applicable, we still need to conceptualize the process of governance in which the policy of real-existing socialism was created. In order to do so, I use the building bloc proposed to make up governing model in complex societies by Guy B. Peters and Jon Pierre. These building blocks are on higher degree of generality than the actual models, for instance, the liberal democratic model of governance, so I use these analytical dimensions without their direct association to a specific regime type.
There are three types of analytical categories: actors, processes, and outcomes. The actors consist broadly of the government, in our case the party-state complex, and the society. The processes are not dissimilar to the famous “stages of policy process”, but they seem to be more broadly open. First, it is the goal selection that resembles problem definition and agenda setting. Even in classical models, this stage is usually dominated by the government. The decision making process is a part of the governing process where the ways to reach the goals are decided. Closely tied with the decision making is resource mobilization, where legitimacy of the decision is crucial to finding resources to make the policy come into effect. The implementation of the policy is where the instruments chosen in the decision making process are put into effect. Finally, feedback in the form of evaluation of “the actions of the instruments” (Pierre and Peters 2005, 15–16) is presented. In the chapter “Žďár nad Sázavou, we also discuss the final analytical dimension of outcomes. According to Peters and Pierre, this dimension consists of evaluative categories of coherence, inclusiveness, adaptability and accountability.
Problems remaining with the application of these analytical categories are twofold. First, the model is built on an inherent assumption about the relationship between society and the government. Social actors, which the model presupposes to be a prerequisite of the governance conception, are much less identifiable and perhaps play negligible role in the governance. Secondly, since I use the housing policy as a proxy, I am unable to test the applicability of the evolving model of governance during real-existing socialism in other policy fields. It could, for instance, be reasonably assumed that the governing model for security policy created a stovepipe effect, in other words a relatively separate governing structure. The specificities of the relationship between the complex of societal actors and state party actors will be addressed by analyzing the channels of information and the
85 feedback processes. The problem of differences between governing styles in different policy fields must remain open, since this thesis is of a building bloc type and could not include theory testing.
In order to highlight the specific characteristics of policy-making process in real-existing socialism in Czechoslovakia, the main shifts and changes compared to the policy-making process during the period of reformism. These changes are going to be analyzed using mainly intra-party and governmental documents and then checked against other types of sources. The frame of the governance in real-existing socialism is the self- conception of the leading role of the CP. The shift in this area is revealing, since the self-conception is relatively close to the real role, though the actor is referred to in a broad way. This comparative tool is somewhat inadequate, since the reform was stalled, and so it did not realize its intents past the decision making process, which decreases the potential for comparison. However, I still believe that the reformist conception of governance, despite its incompleteness and its reliance more on the declarations than on the actual actions, may be a valuable heuristic tool. On the other hand, the reformist governance style becomes more of a construct departing from the structural reality, with which it should not be mismatched.
Leading role of the party The fundamental document of reformist conception is the Action program, where the passages describing the leading role were utterly critical. For example, it states that “[o]ften in the past, the leading role of the party was understood as a monopolistic concentration of power in the hands of party organs. That was in accordance with the false thesis that the party is a tool of the dictatorship of the working class. This prejudicial conception weakened initiative and responsibility of governmental, economic and social institutions, and damaged the authority of the party. It also prevented the party from carrying out its core functions.” The party did not, according to the Action program, seek to become “‘universal ‘administrator’ of the society, to bind all organizations and every step in life with its directives,” but rather a vehicle that “fosters socialist initiative.” By no means was the party heading toward explicit demise of its leading role, but the shift towards a more open and less strict understanding of the “almighty” party is visible.
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The referential thesis of normalization, on the contrary, stated that “among the stable and invariable values of socialism are:
-the leading role of the working class and its avant-garde. the Communist party;
-the role of the socialist state as a tool of the dictatorship of proletariat;
-the Marxist-leninist ideology and its exercise through the means of mass influence;
-socialist ownership of the means of production and the principles of planned management of the national economy;
-the principles of proletarian internationalism and their consistent application in foreign policy, especially in relation to the USSR.
Where the dictatorship of proletariat and the omnipotence is criticized, it comes back with only a small shift from the party to the “socialist state.” Unified party-state complex could thus be seen as completed, at least in the eyes of the normalizers themselves. The role of “universal administrator,” dismissed by the reformist program, comes back. Another shift is worth mentioning: the role of the ideology and discussion in the public. Where reformists welcome initiative of different social groups, in actuality the “exercise of ideology through the means of mass influence” is attested, in other words, ascription of an important role to propaganda. The systematic influence on public discourse should not be underestimated, as the example of GDR shows (cf. Rueschemeyer 1990; Schildt 1998; Buck 2004; Rowell 2008; Boyer, Henke, and Skyba 2008b) and so the chapter “Housing policy in the public sphere” will address this particular issue.
Actors These differences in the self-conception of the CP in the governance structure lead us to the analysis of the key actors of housing policy. The core actors are to be found in the CCCP in both the cases of the GDR and Czechoslovakia, but the strength and the configuration of the power group changes. The leadership of the reformist period consisted of an alliance between reformists and pragmatics. The reformist were replaced by conservatives led by Vasil Biľak, while the pragmatics, led by Lubomír Štrougal and Gustav Husák remained but changed their orientation.
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The key documents of housing policy, such as the report on the main aspects of housing policy from (Hůla 1971) and the report on implementation of the housing policy from 1975 (Zahradník and Šupka 1975), and of social policy, were drafted under the supervision of the power group. However, in the process of identifying the problem during the goal selection part of the governing process, the reformists formed task groups that involved experts in the field. The goal selection was based on explicit references to expert opinions coming especially from academic environment, demands of social groups, ideas coming from the government and also on public opinion. This broader coalition was replaced by the power center itself, with experts from within the party structures. It is symptomatic that the Social Program, which was trying to substantiate its content with references to experts (e.g., Pinc, Tomeš, Pisci and Šnýd), did not mention much ideology, but rather a conception that drew a firm line between a strictly economic understanding of social policy—where the focus is on a worker, rather than on humanity in general—and its own “humanist” conception of minimizing suffering (Štancel 1969). Before the hot phase of normalization after Gustav Husák took the position of the leader of the CP in April 1969, some of the goals of the housing policy were co-determined by the government, as demonstrated in the 1969 report of František Toman, who was a Minister of Construction in the Government of the Czech Socialist Republic in 1969—1970. Toman was a nominee of the Czechoslovak Popular Party, a dependent part of National Front, itself an organization under the leadership of the Communist Party. His position, both within the party and in the government, was “always” a determinate part of the nomenclature, but he was an outsider to the power structures of the CP. The same applies to Michal Štanceľ, who presented the Social Program as the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs at that time.
The report on housing policy marking the advent of normalization was, on the contrary, prepared in 1971 by Václav Hůla, a Minister for Planning and a deputy Prime Minister, but more importantly a Head of the Economic Commission of the CCCP (Štverák 2010, 379). This report also shows the changing role of experts and the government. Hůla’s report “openly” (in a confidential document) states that “[i]n order to fulfill this goal [of setting the conception and controlling for the realization of the housing policy] efficiently, it must systematically (and sometimes also independently from state institutions) clarify, on which bases, assumptions and political contexts the implementation of the bold, but also realistic conception of housing policy rests” (Hůla 1971, 10). Government is the for “realization”, meaning implementation, while the goal selection and decision making is, at least on the general level, in the hands of the party.
Experts still have some role, but it mostly consists of answering particular technical questions and translating political tasks, such as “objective determination of housing needs” (Hůla 1971, 12, 27).
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They should be of the party or state apparatus, which means under tighter control. Plurality of opinions is specifically rebuffed, when the conception speaks about diversity in expert evaluation of the housing problem (Hůla 1971, 17). The diversity was decreased by a combination of measures ranging from transformation of some of the research facilities under direct control of the CCCP to reversing order of the expert contribution to policy. According to the document, the remaining role of the specifically commissioned expert opinions were to be “recalibrated, since objective scales are missing” (Hůla 1971, 13). From participation on goal selection and external examination of the outcomes, the bulk of experts became part of the propaganda in offering ex post facto substantiation of the measures by the CP and the government (cf. Lérová 1981; Lérová 1983; Čillík 1983; Andrle 1986; Raban 1986a). The advent of ideology applied to the socio-economic sphere is apparent in the complaint of the ”disregard for the rules of the housing sector in recent years” (Hůla 1971, 5). The content of these “rules” is to be explained further in the chapter “Žďár nad Sázavou”.
If experts, the distinctive portion of societal actors, were suppressed, what about the role of other social groups and organizations? The legislative process formally gave some consideration to trade unions, and crucial policy documents were discussed at a forum consisting of government and unions. Despite this fact, the presence of trade union leadership became merely a ritual, since no real discussion was allowed at these fora. Various social organizations played a much more important role in the implementation phase.
The influence of the international or transnational actors was, compared to the declarations on paper and to the relatively high attention paid to them, rather small. The main organization to coordinate economic policies of the countries of Soviet bloc was the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA, sometimes also referred to as Comecon), but its role was far less than the influence of the USSR. After all, the economic system of the Soviet bloc was mostly organized radially (Köves and Oblath 1995, 356). In addition, the plans to change the the CMEA into a supranational organization during Khrushchev years were never realized. As Schrenk describes it, the CMEA never passed the lowest common denominator due to its decision making process and non- binding resolutions (Schrenk 1992, 3). The five-year plan was coordinated among countries so that it included foreign trade as well. While the coordination was mandatory, its extent was not, and eventually, the binding trade quotas were always a matter of bilateral agreements due to extreme
89 complicatedness of the clearing procedures of trade by the CMEA. In the social welfare domain, and specifically in housing policy, the CMEA did not make much difference.
Resource mobilization To understand the resource mobilization phase in the centrally planned system, the planning procedure should be clarified. At the forefront of all planning measures was the five year plan, a set of goals and ways to match resources with these plans. Among the analytical categories, this plan would include nearly all phases of governing. It was proposed by the State Planning Committee and, in theory, it was the pivotal document of economic planning. In practice, however, the five-year plan was no more than an implemented set of directives put forward by the preceding Congress of the CP called “Směrnice”.
As stated above, all congressional documents were prepared well in advance by the CCCP. For the directives in the field of housing policy, the CCCP delegated the preparation of the draft to the economic department, while governmental agencies, namely the Ministry of Construction or Ministry of Technics and Investment, were consulted with technicalities. Furthermore, since these directives had profound influence on regions, a round of consultations with regional branches of the CP preceded the final version for the congress.
The resolution of the congress became in reality the master set of rules, goals and general instruments to which even the CCCP referred (cf. Navrátilová 1986, 6). That does not mean the five- year plan, passed in the form of law, had no meaning; it only compares the power of the master document and the monopoly to interpret it (which logically lay with the CCCP) to a law passed by the government. The plan included binding targets, usually in the form of increase in different economic and social areas in percentage.(cf. Předpis č. 115/1971 Sb. - Zákon České národní rady o státním plánu rozvoje národního hospodářství České socialistické republik... - Konsolidované znění 2013; Zákon o šestém pětiletém plánu na léta 1976 až 1980 - č. 69/1976 Sb. - Konsolidované znění 2013; Zákon o sedmém pětiletém plánu na léta 1981-1985 - č. 122/1981 Sb. - Konsolidované znění 2013; Zákon o pětiletém plánu na léta 1986-1990 - č. 87/1986 Sb. - Konsolidované znění 2013). In housing, in the fifth and sixth five-year plans for the years 1971–1976 and 1976–1980, it even set the targets for total apartments constructed. As construction activity lagged behind in the years 1976–1980, the targets were no longer mentioned in terms of the absolute numbers of apartments. Due to the legal
90 form of the plan and the unwieldy way of setting mid-term targets, the plans were mostly failing, and the situation created incentives to cheat and to use statistics in a “creative” way. Baňouch points out to the bendable provisions included in the law and concludes that even the legal form of a law did not secure its rigidity and was overshadowed by frequent changes (Baňouch, 762–763). What became more important were much more specific yearly plans. The permanent calls for improvement in management of the economy and relative flexibility of the way the targets were met (or better unmet) gave high informal power to the management of state enterprises (Kornai 1992, 396).
With the resource mobilization and implementation, the role of government, including its local branches, increased. The so called rozpracování (elaboration) of the resolutions of the CP Congress was mostly up to the government, while the State Planning Committee was coordinating the work. Even in the latter phases, the CCCP and other lower branches of the CP were periodically consulted, and the implementation steps went through an iterative process between the governmental and party hierarchy at each level. Points of the plan, that were set as political priorities were under more direct control of the CP.
The process was complicated and intricate, and a high degree of uncertainty thus prevented all the actors from experimenting in order to pre-empt potential vetoes by the principal player—the CP. The position of the CP was somewhat blurred by the governing structure and its operation was curtailed by the information flow “from the ground”.
The results applicable to housing policy were fourfold:
a) The pressure on quantitative figures affected the quality of production negatively.
Low incentives for quality steadily became one of the politically most sensitive issues in housing policy. The industrialized production, which became the dominant way of engagement of the state in the construction of housing, created social tension at a level nearly as persistent as was the demand for housing.
b) The lack of incentives (and “natural regulation of thereof by price mechanism of demand and supply”) for quality increased the prices of maintenance.
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The ever-increasing prices of the maintenance of housing were also a persistent topic of all documents on housing. The result of low incentives for quality also meant additional costs for maintenance, sometimes rapidly reaching the high proportions of acquisition costs.34
c) Some of the priorities for regional distribution were politically set, but other factors, such as the spatial distribution of facilities for material construction or human resources were not flexibly directed, since the impact of this type of satisfaction was not in the interest of their managers.
d) The largely mechanical policy making “from above” gives us preliminary picture about the hierarchy of values and the meaning of welfare in the society, as I have set it in the methodological chapter. The mechanical understanding of needs and their fulfillment should thus comprise a strong factor in the evaluation of these values and needs as understood within the system.
All these obstacles limited, in a mechanical way, satisfaction of needs in the welfare domain and added to a tendency of routine bypassing of goals rather than meeting them. A good example in housing policy is the distribution of handing over of houses constructed each year. Even the propaganda machine could not escape the results of “recording freakiness” that resulted in “over 50% of apartments handed over just in December.” (Vltavský 1976). The preference and bureaucratization of the housing policy thus had very tangible effects on satisfaction of needs we are analyzing. However, the main source of power remained within the CP. Hůla’s report makes clear that “in our society, the right to evaluate the societal urgency [of housing needs] belongs to the party.“ (1971, 9).
34 Hůla’s report from 1971 warns, that “costs of maintenance of some of the Prague’s prefabs constructed in 1960s as high as 50% of the acquisition costs” (1971, 26). 92
The story of housing policy
“A house is torn down from the roof and built from the foundations. This applies not only to those who build incomparably more complex structures. Such as a new social system.” (Raban 1986a, 14).
The housing policy of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia could not reasonably be considered as an entirely new project without any ties to previous policies in the pre-1948 period. Part of the current historiography stresses the discontinuity and novelty of the communist-era policies, especially in areas that are regarded as key features of the communist regime. Chief domains that are regarded as novelty “invented” by the communist regime (compared to its democratic or semi- democratic predecessors and with the help of the USSR) usually include security policy with its political police, information management policy with censorship and most importantly the party- state complex instead of liberal constitutional order with party competition. As chapter “History of the social welfare domain in the Czech territory” has shown, in the social welfare domain, it is hard to maintain this paradigm in full, since most of the policies could not escape the conditions of the previous era. Housing policy naturally represents a literal embodiment of this idea of continuity, since an important element of housing policy is the housing stock at hand. As will be shown further in the text, this legacy in the form of housing stock, its ownership structure, state of the housing stock and other features of the initial conditions in the housing domain remained key exculpatory figures of persuasive speeches within the official texts on housing policy.
The theoretical set of this thesis on policy narrative does not allow us to simply “retell” the story of housing policy within the social welfare domain. Reflectiveness upon the historical and conceptual context of our analysis seems to be a natural requirement. We shall therefore start the history with sources of historical narratives, which are naturally present, either directly or through referential concepts carved out by these, in (any) policies of the day, mostly as part of the argumentation grasping legacies, origins and departure points and thus setting a frame of reference (Dryzek 1993, 222).
There are at least five distinct lines of narratives on the historical development of housing policy. Let us first identify these and look at their different roles and the genres they reside in.
1) “Propaganda”: ideologically loaded texts for domestic or international use
2) Expert texts of the era
93
3) Policy documents of the era
4) Various traditions within current scholarship (emancipatory dictatorship in social history vs. totalitarianism vs. revisionism )
5) Current policy of the Czech Republic
However, the first three could all be placed in the first category (“Propaganda”). The version inherent in the post-1989 policy is touched upon in the conclusion. The remaining two categories— the propaganda story line and the scholarly literature view—are treated here and compared.
94
Propaganda
It is no surprise that the history of housing policy was an integral part of the domestic propaganda in Czechoslovakia. It is also logical that the ideologically loaded texts aimed at foreign readers were more aimed at explication of the Czechoslovak housing policy accentuated the general frame of transformation from the capitalist order into the then present “socialist” one. A prime example of these narratives is a book by Přemysl Raban, a prominent expert on housing in 1980s and the author of a brochure on the housing policy in Czechoslovakia from 1986 (Raban 1986a).
Raban’s narrative incorporates elements presented peripherally in other text originating in the Socialist bloc, even in the texts that are less ideologically loaded or more precisely “overexposed” (cf. Lérová 1983, 10; ÚV KSČ 1986, 22; Čillík 1983; Navrátilová 1986, 5). The choice to analyze and depict Raban’s text, a specific genre of “information book”, to represent genres of propaganda texts, expert texts from Czechoslovakia, and even historical arguments in legislation, is the clarity of its argument. It is free of impediments of potential feedback by domestic audience, and one may hypothesize that some of its formulations would be too “straightforward” (i.e., manipulative) for Czechoslovak citizens. Raban (1986a, 39) states that "every citizen can satisfy his or her requirements by a variety of means and in due course. This is an expression of the genuinely exercised right to housing in the period of building an advanced socialist society." The narrative is captured in a diagram below. Raban attempts at comparison between processes in housing domain within capitalist system in Czechoslovakia and processes after the transformation to socialism also because of the expected readership, who would supposedly be mostly from capitalist countries.35
35 The representativeness of Raban’s text on housing policy is apparent also from the fact that it has been translated into English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguse, and published in 1986 as an information book (Raban 1986b; Raban 1986c; Raban 1986d; Raban 1986e; 1986b). The original Czech edition remained, for understandable reasons, in manuscript. Raban, educated in law, established himself as an expert on economic and legal aspects of housing policy. 95
DIAGRAM 2: Propaganda view on the housing domain in capitalism and socialism
Source: Author.
With just a few references to Marxist or Marxist-Leninist theory underlying the transformation, the main characteristics of the transition after 1948 are “democratization and humanization”, “rapid growth of living standards” and de-commodification of rents. Whereas capitalist housing stock has been developed in a fragmented and uncontrolled manner, the socialist housing construction is “carefully planned and guided process.” The intent of the development of housing stock as well as its utilization in capitalism is “business” for the bourgeois, while the motivation is to receive income without work through speculation, business and “financial blackmail”. The socialist housing market is guided by equalizing principles in order to achieve content of workers.
Historical development from “poor housing conditions” of the “not so distant past” had to transform and restructure the very foundations of capitalist housing sector. The first step was transfer of
96 ownership, where Raban rules out any violence, saying that "former bourgeois elements, denied the possibility to profit, usually of their own accord ceded their housing property to public hands. And if a proportion of housing facilities is still owned privately, their users enjoy the same conditions as the occupants of the state owned flats" (1986a, 23). The notion of the accord requires a comment- current definitions of the “de facto” expropriation in international law36 are as close to Raban’s description as possible.
Raban’s optimistic tone and confident stems, in the logic of his storyline, with positioning of the then current state of housing system in an “advanced socialist society”. In his depiction of the state of housing policy of Czechoslovakia in 1986, he stated that “every citizen can satisfy his or her requirements by a variety of means and in due course” (1986a, 39). Still, even Raban cannot escape an analysis of the evolution, where the inattention to housing by the Communist party in the early 1950s is a roadblock to the otherwise smooth steps towards “genuinely exercised right to housing” (1986a, 40). His formula to overcome these troubling historical failures is relatively simple. The development is, once again, immobilized by the capitalist economy. He simply ascribes the deficiencies in abandonment of investment into housing in 1950s by the preoccupation by the "restructuring of the fragmented capitalist industrial production“ (Raban 1986a, 24). Further steps starting with renewed attention to housing at the XI congress of the CP, which “gave fundamental directives”, (Raban 1986a, 25), the following XII Congress with concrete principles of allocation, and finally, the XV Congress that redirected its focus towards the stabilization of the workforce. Thanks to Raban, it seemed that the path was smooth and inevitable toward Czechoslovakia being one of the leaders in housing construction in the 1970s. Stress was placed on affordability of housing (low rents) and allocation principles were based on “legitimate claims” (Raban 1986a, 43). The only exceptions from the equal mechanisms of allocation is the priority given to important workers and diplomats.
Let me remind the reader here that the task of this passage is not to expose propaganda or the official picture at large to a “reality check”, but rather to expose its main concepts and building blocks. The brevity and the already mentioned overexposed nature of Raban’s “information text”
36 Comeaux and Kinsella (1997) differentiate between creeping and indirect expropriation. This case would probably fall under the indirect one. Expropriation in general is not necessarily illegal, but indirect always is. 97 allows us to work not only with the story-line, but also with the blind spots or with the concepts that are so general that they become blurred. Terms such as “legitimate claims”, “important workers” or “meeting of requirements”, “content of workers” call for further exploration by themselves.
Before I turn my attention to the scholarly texts, I should point to a variety among expert texts. As I have shown earlier, there is a distinct category of semi-official or semi-open expert texts on housing policy. Whereas ideological scholars like Karel Pinc or Irena Lérová are more or less in line with the propaganda line, a thorough reading of this “grey zone” of expert knowledge reveals some dissent. A higher level of criticalness brings this genre closer to contemporary scholarly literature.37 Slight differences could play crucial role in the assessment of the state of Czechoslovak housing policy. Where Raban praises Czechoslovak leadership, research report of the Slovak Výzkumný ústav životnej úrovne in 1983—well before any notion of the liberalization trends of přestavba—warns of uncritical and even misleading comparisons between socialist and non-socialist and their levels of housing construction in 1970s (Čillík 1983, 66–67)38 The precarious nature of the comparison given by the research team of VÚŽÚ is clear; the construction boom in “capitalist” countries had already begun in 1960s, and the market became relatively saturated by the beginning of the 1970s, whereas the construction activity stagnated in the 1970s, as will be shown below (Čillík 1983, 67). Another example is the categories which our representatives Raban and Čilík chooses to compare with capitalist countries. Raban’s persasive intent is better served using a comparison of change of rents in state-owned housing. The revealing lack of change in Czechoslovakia from 1970 to 1982 contrasts with steep rise in major capitalist countries. No actual figures are given and the source is UN statistics on housing (Raban 1986a, 43). Since VÚZÚ is focused on the tasks of housing policy, it compares the quality of housing, and thus it makes argument for deeper improvements in Czechoslovakia. Though Czechoslovak figures for a mean of newly built apartments is not given directly, figures for other socialist countries (GDR and Bulgaria) are well below the numbers for any given capitalist countries. Solution to similar problems in Fakta a Argumenty [Facts and Arguments], a brochure produced by the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the CCCP in 1986 is complementary to Raban (ÚV KSČ 1986). Even if it starts earlier and compares the relative construction activity from 1960, it stresses the comparison between two given years in the “pre-
37 In concrete conclusions, this could also be a matter of influence of the texts after 1989. However, important are basic principles of (scientific) inquiry. 38 The research report was not freely circulated, it is marked "len pro vnůtornů potrebu" [internal use only]. 98
Munich Czechoslovakia”39 and the peak in 1970s (ÚV KSČ 1986, 18). Even the answer to a straightforward rhetorical question: “How to characterize the satisfaction of housing needs from the point of view of apartments built after WWII?” is followed by a “splendid exclusion” of the 1945– 1960 period. The ten year boom in 1970–1980 that followed a clear crisis is compared to the period of 1919–1945 (ÚV KSČ 1986, 8–9).
Scholars on history of housing in the communist Czechoslovakia
The scholarly texts dealing with the historical processes in the housing welfare domain in Czechoslovakia are relatively scarce. Milestones in this area are texts by Czech sociologist Jiří Musil (1992a; 2005b; 2005a). Most of his work operates in an interdisciplinary field of urban studies, while politics of housing are on the edge of his interest. Similarly, the topic appears to be part of the interest of current social history with Lenka Kalinová and Jakub Rákosník paying most attention to the communist era. However, there is relatively very strong stream of inquiry on the same topic regarding the German Democratic Republic’s housing policies and politics. Crucial position in comparative studies in housing policies and politics belongs to Josef Hegedüs and Ivan Tosics, who set the foundation of what they call the East European Housing Model.
The features of the East European Housing Model are, according to Tosics and Hegedüs, valid for all the countries of the socialist bloc excluding Albania and USSR, and it is therefore useful as a heuristic device for analysis of peculiarities of the Czechoslovak one. From methodological point of view, such a model could create an anchor for our single case study. As mentioned before, it shall be supplied by a reference to the most similar case, the housing policy of the GDR.
At the forefront is the influence by the USSR. Though it was, as we can see, limited in its actual application, it remained a benchmark (no matter how paradoxical this may appear to be, especially in the case of Czechoslovakia and GDR) (cf. Marcuse and Schumann 1992; Musil 1987; Musil 2005a; J. C. Scott 1999). Housing policy operates within centrally planned economy. The intent to transform housing policy into a service remained uncompleted, since the inherited housing stock of the pre- communist period could not be entirely redistributed due to the very high administrative costs. The
39 Note the ideological loading even in the label for the interwar period. Munich treaty was an integral part of the story of fall of "capitalist bourgeois system" and attachment to the USSR. 99 same applies to the administrative costs for an environment where all private transactions are banned. Private initiative, as we could see specifically on our case, was limited, but its total ban turned out to be unbearable. It shifted to indirect control within set limits by land policy, supply of materials and setting of ownership rights.
Feedback mechanisms of housing policy were largely not based on price and demand, but on central planning. The economic mechanism was thus not influenced by private sphere (never mind its sometimes large scale).
The allocation mechanism was largely a matter of the CPs, while the party played a role of an arbiter among competing groups. The criteria for allocation combined political and social aspects with nomenclature being privileged group with a reserved rights for best quality of housing. Housing capacity worked, for the ones who used it, as an indirect wage or social provision. Both these features added to the fact that the main determinants of housing policy were of a political rather than an economic nature.
If we apply Hirschmanns “voice and exit scheme” (Hirschman 1993) to the housing policy, state housing sector would be the arena for voice and private housing sector would be the exit. The state housing sector was generally fragmented due to its sectoral and hierarchical divisions. Regionalization of planning after Stalinist period enabled regional CP organizations to enhance their power. Corruption and patronage evolved as key features within the state housing sector.
A relatively separate private sector of housing evolved as an answer to the shortage economy, especially as a channel for forced savings. State control was not merely formal, and a variety of approaches in different countries consisted of different combinations of discriminatory practices, tolerance and encouragement.
Policy turns and shifts A realistic global view recognizes three distinct milestones or turning points in the housing policy of the communist regime. After a prelude of social-democratic authoritarianism in the first three post- war years, the first turning point is the year 1948 and its aftermath, and the second one is a returned
100 attention to housing construction and housing policy as such in 1958–1959. Finally, it is the renewed effort in housing construction, but also housing propaganda, renewed secrecy and high politicization of the housing agenda with the advent of normalization in 1969-1972. It would be utterly misleading (and positivist) to assume that these policy changes were just consequences of the actual situation in housing in the respective times. Even the different domestic sources associated with the ruling party-state inherently admit, as I will show, the political nature of the agenda-setting process, since there is little space for “objective” arguments about the inception of ambitious housing policy even in 1959, eleven years after the communist coup. The turning point in 1959 is marked with a document that became referential in late years. Another document I also identify as a milestone, from August 1969, shall be presented in section “The Housing Document”. I believe that some of the later developments can be understood through a close reading of distinct/specific statements in these charter documents.
It essential to point here again to the assumption of this thesis; interests, as well as needs and rights, are not objective categories on which a policy, in the meaning of the most efficient technique of satisfying needs, is best for fulfilling ideas or accomplishing rights. These turning points are all based on interests and their strength, both in political sphere within the party-state and in the social sphere. Above all, they derive their policy arguments from the definition of the problem, itself a biased procedure naturally involving power relations (Mehta 2011) Following, for instance, Belland and Cox (2011), I opt for an agency-centered approach that promotes a view of change as a choice of (the) people, rather than seeing a change as a mere consequence of objective conditions, and thus a predetermined and predictable move.
The Housing Document The document entitled “K řešení bytového problému v ČSR do roku 1970” [To the Solution of the Housing Problem in the Czechoslovak Republic till the year 1970 (KSČ 1960)] was an official resolution adopted by the plenary session of the CCCP at its meeting on March 4 and 5, 1959. Later, it was being referred to as the “Housing Document”. The document marks a turn from what John Kingdon calls “governmental agenda” to “decision agenda” (Kingdon 2003, 4). Whereas housing was already on governmental agenda (a list of subjects that are getting attention) from 1953 or 1954, as we have seen, it entered the decision agenda (the list of subjects within the governmental agenda that are up for an active decision) with this clear aim and prescriptions for practical steps. In other words, most of the later trends in housing policy were formulated in this housing document and, to some contemporary scholars, it might even be considered the only milestone in housing policy, with
101 the later developments demonstrating merely minor shifts (Deken 1994, 38; Musil 1992a). Even if I consider such an assertion to be exaggerated, it is still worth analyzing the housing document in more depth.
The document declares itself as a form of realization of the results of the XI Congress of the CP in June 1958. The XI Congress set the main task to “accomplish the building of socialism.” Apart from the document on housing, there were other measures to “increase the living standards“ taken at the same meeting of the CCCP: decrease the retail prices, increase child benefits, increase social security benefits and cut working hours (Rudé právo, March 7, 1959, 1–3). The document was swiftly made public on March 8.
I agree with Bennet and George that a policy change is usually a result of multiple causes, which are interrelated with each other (2005, 103). As Czechoslovakia was a firm part of the Soviet bloc and the leadership of the USSR in politics and policies was an imperative, the first set of conditions for the document should be sought after in Soviet policy. At large, the housing document along with other aforementioned resolutions of the CCCP stemming from the XI Congress of the CP could be seen as a decisive step towards de-Stalinisation in policy. As the XI Congress of the CP was the first one to react to the XX Congress of the CP of the USSR, where Stalinist distortions were criticized and improvement in living standards and particularly in housing was mentioned as one of the key features of the new Khrushchevite policies (J. Smith 2011, 206). These policies placed strong emphasis on housing construction, as the influence of the "On the Development of housing Construction in the USSR from July 1957" documents shows (cf. J. Smith 2011, 212), but also made decisive steps to transfer the supervision and organization of housing construction from commissariats to soviets (J. Smith 2011, 206). These shifts were, more or less, followed by the CP in Czechoslovakia already in 1956 (Pernes, 125). However, internal dynamics of the CP and the scheduling of the party congress for 1958 did not allow for a more systematic attempt at emulation of the soviet leadership. Even if this dependency seems to contradict my previous stress on the “openness” of every policy decision, still, there are good reasons to keep it. The Soviet housing policy model was based mostly on corporate construction, and housing was mostly a matter of social provision, while individual construction initiative was suppressed (Connor 1997). In that sense, neither Czechoslovakia nor its “comrade” countries of the Soviet bloc in Central and Eastern Europe followed strictly these methods (Turner, Hegedus, and Tosics 1992). Therefore, it is still valuable to
102 look at the way policy actors formulate certain policy events as ”problems” (Yanow 1999, 11) and, also, to pay attention to the way they select certain “solutions’ among many alternatives and match them to the problem (Kingdon 2003, 19–20).
The reason for the timing, which is the most important element in the construction of a frame for policy, is given with the help of Marxist-Leninist determinism: “The task to solve the housing problem emerged naturally on this particular evolutionary level of our society” (KSČ 1960, 260). The following expansion of the argument states that, though the pace of housing construction was fast after 1948, and the quality relatively exceeded the pre-war standards, still, the housing needs of the population were not fully satisfied. Most other fields affected by the detrimental legacy of capitalism are solved according to the CCCP, and it is now the right time to turn housing construction into priority (KSČ 1960, 261). The goal is set in concrete terms: to build 1,200,000 apartments by 1970, therefore to increase the pace by more than 120% compared to the previous period. Still, according to the CCCP, “the socialist regime possesses every prerequisite for fulfillment.” (KSČ 1960, 261) Even a criticism of the quality of housing and managerial “use of the plan” is present, suited here to prepare grounds for the solution, rather than to sufficiently analyze causes. What are the proposed solutions?
First, the proposed decentralization of planning contrasts sharply with centralization of investments, and no solution could be found within the text. The second solution is the industrialization of production of construction material. However, the most important argument for a realistic increase in housing capacity is, perhaps startlingly, individual activity, called here “participation of the public” (KSČ 1960, 264, 274–278). Though state support was especially declared for the re-introduced construction by housing cooperatives, this move could be interpreted as a “silent” demise on omnipotence of the state and an aim at dominance of the construction by the state (including corporations). It is said that housing demands increase with the increase of living standards. I consider the use “demands” instead of needs as an approach to understanding the logic of needs and their fulfillment and a way to explain the inability of the state to cater to the legitimate needs of the population. Housing, then, could become a hybrid, or in the jargon of today’s economics, a mixed good. This view is in contradiction with the previous conception of housing as a service. The hybrid nature of housing is clear from the description of cooperative housing, where “social and
103 individual interests are best applied” (KSČ 1960, 265). The new structure of the housing construction domain put forward by the housing document is depicted below.
DIAGRAM 3: Structure of the housing sector according to the Document on Housing (1959)
Source: Author.
The rhetorically asserted domination of the state-housing construction is constricted to serve only specific workers, in order to stabilize the living conditions of the workforce and lower-income families. The organizational shift to National Councils, either at the local or regional level, led to an
104 increase of the power of not only the regional councils, but primarily the regional headquarters of the CP. That being said, this paradoxically does not mean the declared de-centralization came to fruition, since investments that were made according to the housing document were not “fragmented”, but rather,, centralized.
There are number of important messages in the housing document. It clearly marks an end to the ambition of the state to steadily debase individual initiative and reconfigure housing into a service. The shift of stress onto an inverse trend—the supported (and controlled) increase in individual stakes in housing—is definitely a profound change that was meant from the outset as an end to what Musil calls the revolutionary phase in housing policy (Musil 1992a). The omnipotent state could not label the concluding chapter with an appeal “The Participation of workers, a decisive element for fulfilling tasks in housing construction, maintenance and managing of the housing stock” (KSČ 1960, 274). What qualifies the involvement of “workers” (citizens) is the notion of the role of the party- state members. Though national councils and trade unions seemingly share the highest proportion of powers and responsibilities for the development of housing policy, it is finally up to the members of the CP and their regional and local organizations (KSČ 1960, 278). The upcoming “statewide discussion on housing” is, despite its tightly controlled course, aimed at gathering data for “a complex housing policy planning” (Musil 1962, 3), which is another sign of a change. It is the rise of the reliance on experts and an attempt at improving the understanding of the housing needs of the population. For the same reasons, a Committee on the Solution of the Housing Problem was set by the CCCP in 1959. The leading role of the CP, even in regional planning, and the dominance of the political dimension of change in housing policy is documented by a number of derivative resolution of the regional headquarters of the CP written after the housing document (cf. Komunistická 1961; Komunistická 1959).
What, therefore, remained valid from 1959 until the “normalization” period? Apart from the profound (re-)organization of the housing stock, forms of construction, and the leading role of the CP, it is also the configuration of these different types of housing, which I describe and analyze in chapter “Types and forms of housing”. State housing turned into a strategic combination of socially and politically driven tools with a limited share, while expectations of improvement shifted into “construction-housing cooperatives”. It should be noted again, that the sector of cooperative housing, relatively thriving on in the interwar period, did not become autonomous, but was allowed
105 again to build and thus grow (Dvořák 2009, 4–12). The construction by the JZD [Unified agricultural cooperatives] was just temporary, and it was abolished in 1964 and it did not become an important type (Dvořák 2009, 17),
106
Ownership structure of the housing domain
The structure of ownership is the key descriptive information about a particular housing sector in a jurisdiction, but it is seriously incomplete without an analysis of the legal and administrative context within which the ownership existed. The meaning of private, public, state, national or any other form ownership can be reasonably assessed, not just acknowledging the particular civil and other formal legal norms, but also the actual practices and customs that define the way these formal structures are fulfilled by daily operations. The treatment of the role and meaning of private property is therefore indispensable in understanding of our subject matter: the role and function of housing policies.
My treatment of the development of property rights and property forms starts with notes on the ideological frame. Even if the ideological embrace of the practical policy steps became relatively loose during real-existing socialism in this domain, it is still important to keep the distinct horizon provided by the ideology and to trace its imprints in the actual legal norms. These introductory notes include us to the “legacies of Stalinism” in ownership rights regarding the housing sector. Again, it is rather a set of practices that were never brought back during normalization, but even the potential, the sole existence of this alternative and its rootedness in collective memory shaped actual practices to a high degree.
Property by Marxism-Leninism: Ideological frame The leading ideology of the communist regimes, Marxism-Leninism, considered property as the main principle of history. As the form of property is the real power behind profound political processes, it did not aspire to anything less radical than an abolition of private property (Gebhardt 2009; Šimíček and Kysela 2009). However, complete abolishment was not pursued, both due to strategic considerations leading to a sequence of incremental steps heading towards the final stage with no private property, and also thanks to pragmatic and logistic aspects of such a grand objective. The ultimate problem, given the original Marxist theory, was the existence of money (Tchipev 2000, 4). This inconsistency—or, in Tchipev’s words, the “unresolved dilemma” (2000, 5)—between the ideological aims and practice was reflected both in the general legal and administrative treatment of property rights and ownership, but also specifically in housing. In the housing sector, the ultimate goal was to transform housing into pure service, “free” it from its commodity characteristics.40
40 This concept of housing as a service should not be confused with decommodification, a concept (re- )introduced in the context of welfare state theory by Esping-Andersen, to denote process in which state decreases reliance of a person’s well-being on labor market (Esping-Andersen 1990). 107
As in other cases, the structure of the legal system mirrors some of the aspirations of the regime more clearly than statistics. It would be misleading to assume that the surprisingly high proportion of privately owned housing in the GDR and Czechoslovakia (Stanilov 2007, cf.) are simply a proof of the incapability of the communist regime to pursue its goals. The general direction was rooted in the principles of Marxism-Leninism incorporated in the legal system of the USSR which were generally shared with Czechoslovakia, though with different dynamics and distinctly different results.
The legal system design of the transformation of ownership into what was called socialist legality (German Sozialistische Gesetzlichkeit and Czech socialistická zákonnost) actually mirrored the plans to gradually suppress private forms of ownership. The neological dyad of the people’s property”(Volkeigentum and socialistické společenské vlastnictví) and personal property (persönliches Eigentum and osobní forma vlastnictví) was created as an antinomy. These two categories symbolically replaced “private” property, a bourgeois type destined to vanish. This new dyad is informed by the 1936 constitution of the USSR, and the people’s property enjoyed a dominant and privileged position (Šimíček and Kysela 2009, 311)41. The degree to which this preference was successful in the economy was striking even among countries of the Soviet bloc. According to Kornai, Czechoslovakia, with its 99.3% share of public sector, places Czechoslovakia near the top, high above its central European counterparts (Kornai 1992, 72).
The conception of personal property referred to the Marx-Leninist theory of means of production. As opposed to private property, personal property followed the 1936 constitution and embodied “the so-called satisfaction of material and cultural needs” (Betts 2009, 2). While the civil code in 1950 (141/1950 Sb.; zákon, Občanský zákoník 2013) merely tolerated the individual forms of ownership, the subsequent civil code of 1964 specifically stated preference for satisfaction of individual needs by state. Also, it limited the ownership rights in a general way by stating that ”items gathered contrary to the interests of society and over the extent of personal consumption of the owner, his family and his household, do not enjoy protection of personal ownership” [Věci
41 Though not entirely conclusive, it should be noted that this preference for socialist forms of ownership, even though its strength generally decreased in communist Czechoslovakia with time, is visible in all public documents mentioning ownership of the housing stock used for this text. The perceived status of the private “osobní forma vlastnictví” as tolerated, even supported, but inferior form of ownership remained present even in texts from 1980s (cf. Navrátilová 1986; or Raban 1986a). 108 nahromaděné v rozporu se zájmy společnosti nad míru osobní potřeby vlastníka, jeho rodiny a domácnosti nepožívají ochrany osobního vlastnictví.](ČSSR 1964a, odst. 130). In general, the satisfaction of needs, the rights of the user were much higher compared to the rights of the owner, be it the state or a private individual. This preference had its direct impact in the housing sector. Let me briefly go through the most important types of limits imposed on the ownership rights in communist Czechoslovakia.
Legal theory (and institutionalist economy) distinguishes a “classical triad” of types of elements of ownership based on Romanic law tradition:
-The right to make use of physical objects (ius utendi)
-The right to the income from it (ius fruendi)
-The power of management, including that of alienation (ius abutendi) (Furubotn and Richter 2000, 77).
Actual meanings of these rights are always dependent on the socio-political context in which they are enjoyed and applied, but since the general condition for a “full ownership” in the meaning of unconstrained enjoyment of all these components is limited to “things that can be used exclusively by their owners” (Furubotn and Richter 2000, 79) and not to public goods, the real content of these rights is usually narrower in the housing domain. The best example is commonly imposed limits on ius fruendi in rented apartments, i.e. the regulation of rents. Rent regulation is relatively common in liberal democratic regimes with market economy, albeit with different goals and using varying tools (Lind 2001). Still, distinctive departures from the rule of law appeared in communist Czechoslovakia in the housing domain in the conception of rent control (ius fruendi), the administrative assignment of tenants (ius abutendi) and the expropriation (ius utendi).
The history of ownership regulation in housing Even before 1938, part of the rental housing stock was regulated by caps to an increase in the level of rent allowed (Poláková 2006, 245–246), but this limitation was applicable only to older housing and it steadily became the means tested. Narrowing down the conditions under which the rent is regulated resulted in a relatively liberal market in rental housing. This tendency contrasted highly
109 with the global freeze on rents in older housing in Germany, where the development from “consumer socialism” in housing was a matter of tackling the housing shortage from 1914 through the Weimar republic through the Third Reich period (and in the GDR even until 1990) (Führer 1995). As Jakub Rákosník (2010) already demonstrated, the roots of much of the seemingly authoritarian legal instruments, such as the tight and administratively set regulation of rents and the “commanding right” of local authorities to introduce tenants into apartments without consent of the owner, are methods not found in the communist era after 1948.
The roots of tight rent control as well as the “command right” originate during WWII. Their authoritarian or paternalist nature was not altered during the post-war, pre-communist period in 1945–1948, but could be understood as a temporary measure to tackle the crisis. Without going deeper into details, we could assume that the legal and political instruments used to limit rental housing were imported as part of policy learning from the socialist Weimar, and later, from the Nazi dictatorship. I will come back to this moment using the thesis of Götz Aly (2008) in the conclusion.
From 1948, a system of centralized regulation of rents was introduced. In 1950, relatively low— according to Rákosník even “radically low”—level of rents was based solely on mechanical rules. The price of the rent of an apartment of buildings built after 1945 was set by price per meter of the apartment, and the prices differed according to the number of inhabitants in the administrative unit (city) and also based on the type of apartment. The freeze on rentals of older apartment was codified and supported by 371/1952 for the older houses. Moreover, this norm completed a system of de-facto expropriation based on a combination of measures: extremely low income from rents for the owner,42 high prescribed maintenance obligations by the owner, and the inability of the owner to choose his tenants. These measures, supplemented by introduction of a right of municipalities to pursue reconstructions of privately owned housing in 1959,43 resulted in the demise of the remaining property rights for a majority of the remaining owners. This process was later called “voluntary handover” by an official expert Přemysl Raban in 1986, whereas legal scholar Stanislav Balík coined it as “significant interference” that “led to “injustice”(2011, 1). In fact all the content of property rights apart from personal occupancy of the owner was eliminated. Still, even this right had its strict limits.
42 The sources differ in the relative amount of rents to wages, but the usual percentage is around 5%. 43 The costs of these forced reconstructions were exacted from the owner. 110
The commandment system of the WWII also introduced a right of public authorities to command a tenancy in “excessive” or “oversized” [nadměrný] apartments. The definition of “oversizedness” evolved; from 1941, it was based solely on number of members of households (with varying conditions on children etc.), while from 1956, the decisive factor was the square meters per person of the household (with a quota of 12 m2) (ČSR 1956). In 1964 with a new law on housing stock management (ČSSR 1964b), the quota increased to 18 m2.44 An important factor is the duty of an inhabitant of such an apartment to report the fact of his/her oversizedness, which was demanded under sanctions. The municipal authorities had the right at their discretion, which meant creation of a space for bribery. Rákosník supposes that the actual use of commandment of tenants gradually faded (2010, 450), but no reliable statistics on the application of these measures is yet available. Under more “constricted” conditions, “oversizedness” remained a valid option from 1964 till its abolishment in 1991 (ČSFR 2013).
Beside the aforementioned limits of ownership rights, usually concerning group owners that obtained their possession before the communist coup in 1948, there is the question of eligibility of the bearer of the rights himself. The distinguishing between loyal and disloyal citizens (though technically, these groups were disparate), was another way to apply the “class justice” in Czechoslovakia. Using the language of the legal norms that were used for the expulsion of Germans after WWII, so-called “unreliable persons from the state view” [státně nespolehlivé osoby] were identified as disloyal. Based on the law on housing management (ČSR 1948a) and its implementation regulation (ČSR 1948b), the decision about disloyalty was made at the discretion of local National Council.
A substantial change in the conception of ownership quality commenced in 1964 with the new civil code (ČSSR 1964a). The intent behind newly established, experimental institute of “personal use”, which Bělovský qualifies as a “substitution” for private ownership, that was meant to “educate the people out of the need to own” (Bělovský 2009, 459–460). The “personal use” in fact increased the rights of the user bringing it close to the meaning of at least ius utendi. In the housing sector, the right of personal use replaced lease and changed the nature of rental housing in all types of housing
44 Higher price was set for the difference between the basic quota of 12m2 and the 18m2, but the difference was so minor that the regulatory intent was never met. 111 ownership. The shift was radical: the personal use was unlimited in time and it could have been inherited. Šmídová points out that the “peculiar” form of personal usage of property owned by others increased the importance of family networks and created a form of “quasi-ownership” (1996). The social consequences of the institute of personal use had important impact on the real- existing socialism, and its legacies reach far beyond the fall of communism (cf. Balík 2011; Šmídová 1996; Ústavní soud České republiky 2000).
The construction of the institute of personal use and its connection with the housing domain would deserve particular attention beyond the scope of this thesis. However, the enormous and detailed focus housing paid by the civil code from 1964 instigates questions on its role in housing policy, or more specifically, on particular intents in the field of housing policy. We could presuppose that, generally, the impact of the new legal institute in housing was not only known, but desired (cf. Bělovský 2009). Moreover, we could presuppose the transformational effect was partly built on the assessment of the limited space in the housing policy, as was concluded in the Document on Housing in 1959. In other words, the vision of the prevailing socialist forms of ownership was altered by the transformation of private forms. This transformation resulted in a decrease of their favorableness and an increase in the role of state as a stabilizer of actual use of the gained forms of “accommodation”.
Also, the legacies of authoritarian institutes of the commanding right of the local council and of the practice of expropriation were not only a memento for the “rule takers” in the newly developing real-existing socialism. Two particularly visible rudiments remained available and were used: the institute of the oversized apartments and the expropriation of apartments of disloyal inhabitants. Despite the fact that the original category of disloyalty inhabitants was abandoned in 1956 by a new regulation of management of housing stock (ČSR 1956), the real-existing socialist regime returned to this practice with the campaign on the “apartments of emigrés” after 1969. This mobilization campaign is dealt with in the chapter “Housing policy in the public sphere. The persistent existence of the commanding right for oversized apartments reappears, though mostly as a threat or underused alternative only in early 1970s, as we shall see in the chapter “Žďár nad Sázavou”.
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Types and forms of housing
Having established the general legal frame, we will now examine the types of housing and their development in real existing socialism. The structure of the domain was, with some minor shifts, set by the Document on Housing, which we analyzed in detail in the chapter “The story of housing policy. Thus, we can now examine the shape of these types in the normalization period. The types of housing in real existing socialism can be defined based on ownership, forms of construction, means of financing, subject of management. Let us start with ownership.
Ownership was commonly divided in its socialist and non-socialist forms. Socialist forms of ownership included personal property, socialist societal property and cooperative collective property. However, Private property was not entirely eradicated, but became residual. Socialist societal property was in fact a state property, as Bělovský (2009)concluded from the somewhat unintelligible definition found in the Commercial code of 1964.45 Housing policy was shaped not only by ideological preferences, but also by blurring the differences between different forms of ownership as well as by the changing between these different forms. The introduction of the legal institution of personal use [osobní užívání] did not only alter only the actual tenancy of buildings, which it replaced, but also changed the structure of ownership in the corporate sphere. In the corporate sphere, the introduction of the legal institution of personal use created quasi-ownership, especially incorporating the ius utendi and some elements of the ius abutendi in case of buildings, but as Mlčoch (1990) shows, in general. It also allowed for the possibility to transfer ownership through sale of the building. This rare possibility was based on both the personal use and personal property.
The transfer of ownership of apartments from the state to individuals marks a fundamental shift in forms of ownership, since the construction efforts of the regime was exclusively the opposite. The process started in 1964, the law č. 52/1966 Sb. on the personal ownership of apartments created the option for individual ownership of an apartment in a newly constructed multi-apartment dwelling, built either by self-help or by the state. Proposed by Peter Colotka, then the “commissioner of justice” of the Slovak National Council and would later be the power group member during
45 “State socialist property is owned by the entire nation. The sole proprietor of all such property is the state.“ [Státní socialistické vlastnictví je vlastnictvím všeho lidu. Jediným vlastníkem všech věcí ve státním socialistickém vlastnictví je stát.] (ČSSR 1964c). 113 normalization, the law substantiated the seemingly radical shift in ownership policy by referencing socialist forms of personal ownership and also the pressure to meet housing needs (NS RČS 1964b). When Colotka used the argument of the “increase in popular initiative”, he created a fissure into the socio-political theory of driving the state towards communism.
Due to a strict condition of the bulk sale of all apartments in the dwelling (based on voluntary interest), the actual sales were realized only in small number—about 7000 apartments between 1967 and 1970—of cases. This number decreased sharply in the 1970s. In order to increase the numbers of apartments sold, but also to increase profit, the government proposed an amendment, which would lift the condition of “bulk sale or no sale” and would also increase the prices of these apartments. The current prime minister, Lubomír Štrougal, argued that the amendment would encourage modernization and renovation of apartments, which was underinvested and lagged behind, and would also give the state budget additional income (FS ČSSR 1978). This amendment was recognized even by Western press (“Flats on sale“ 1978) as a sort of resignation on the ambitious programme of housing policy and a possible sign of crisis A comparison with the GDR, where these de-facto condominiums were never allowed, shows different strategies within the two systems of real existing socialism.
The problem Štrougal was trying to tackle—underinvestment due to a “hold-up problem”—is recognized even in economic theory.46 Though the practical use of this legal option is reported to be negligible, the departure from principle of the socializing property and the recognition of “hold-up problem” indicates that the government recognized the failure of the ownership transformation. Although quasi-ownership could work in some situations, it was doomed to a failure when it came to investment into maintenance, either financially or in terms of the individual labor of the quasi- owners. This might metaphorically be called alienation from housing.
Another sign of quasi-ownership, introduced in 1980, was the regulation which created incentives for older people to move out of the state-owned apartments and into villages. This regulation will allow us later to formulate a hypothesis about two contradicting tendencies in the housing sector. A
46 “Hold-up arises when part of the return on an agent’s relationship-specific investments is ex post expropriationable by his trading partner.”(Che a Sakovics 2006, 1). In the case of housing sector, the legal institute of the personal use caused inefficient bilateral relationship between the state and the occupier. Incentives for investments by quasi-owners were low due to uncertainty about returns that might pass to the state. 114 lump sum premium was intended for people over 50 years of age. The level of this compensation depended on the legally defined category of apartment to be vacated and on its floor surface, but generally, it exceeded the yearly rent by tens of times (MF ČSSR 1980; Hejkal 1982). This shows again that even in the eyes of the official authorities, although the transformation of the conception of property was accomplished, the results were mixed at best.
The structure of the housing sector The overall bias towards housing construction is evident in its prevalent presence in political, legal and media texts, which sometimes tend to confuse the different types of housing. It is understandable that the survival of the private rental housing was not highlighted and also that a regime with a radical program of social transformation did not stress the structure of the existing housing stock. Let me try to disentangle the housing forms described in the Housing document as they were evolving and merging and also describe their financial and political conditions.
The construction of state housing The construction of apartments directly by state was sometimes called communal housing. Although the state, using the state budget, was the sole investor, the subvention for actual investment (bound just for this purpose) was given to County National Committee [Krajský národní výbor], as it held the power to set county economic development plans. The housing infrastructure was also financed fully by the state. In theory, the state housing stock also included corporate housing.
Corporate housing construction, which was in fact held in either cooperative or communal hands, had existed since the housing document until 1981 (Lérová 1983, 276) (other sources state 1979) (Navrátilová 1986, 17). Apartments were financed either by the corporation’s funds or apartments built by state housing construction were assigned to the corporation. If the apartments built by the state housing construction were assigned the corporation, the assigned housing was still under administration of the local council. In the case of apartments invested in by the corporation, the local national council had only limited administrative rights. In official statistics, the corporate housing construction is not considered separately, but is usually merged with the state (/communal) housing construction statistics. The proportion of the production of these types of housing is schematically shown in the table below:
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TABLE 1: Proportion of apartments
Building type 1966-1970 1971-1975 1975-1980
State housing 68% 48% 56%
Corporate 32% 52% 43%
Source: Lérová (1983).
Although state housing construction was initially meant to cover most of the housing needs, the Housing document, with its return to plurality of forms, ascribed the state housing construction a social support function. Although the extent and proportion of the state housing construction changed over time, what remained constant was its full funding from the state budget. The state housing was managed either directly by local authorities, by socialist organizations set up by the local authorities or by state corporations. The state housing is a sector of our primary interest, since it was always set by the regime itself to display the principles of socialist housing policy. The allocation practices and generally the regulation of state housing mirrored the conception of real existing socialism in the most straightforward way. Accordingly, a detailed account of this sector is in section “How to get an apartment”.
Cooperative housing construction After 1948, cooperative housing was allowed to persist on one hand, but was suppressed on the other hand by not allowing the newly renamed sector--popular housing cooperatives [Lidové bytové družstvo]—to construct new housing. Bělovský even assumed that the only reason to keep the corporate form of ownership in existence was to pursue a political strategy of collectivization with the corporate principle at its core. Maňásková (2013, 41–42) describes legal proof of the steps towards convergence of the cooperative and the state housing forms. In 1959, a new form of housing cooperatives was introduced, while the already popular forms housing cooperatives were kept alongside. Over 50% of the cooperative housing construction was financed by state subsidies, which were introduced just in 1964. There were generally two forms of corporate housing construction- self-help and construction by supplying company. In reality, these two forms were combined according to the availability of labor and materials, while the full self-help construction
116 comprised of about 10% of the cooperative housing construction (Občanský zákoník (zákon č. 40/1964 Sb.).
Housing cooperatives were initially assigned to build multi-apartment dwellings with the minimum of 12 apartments (with some exceptions for villages and specific cooperatives in agriculture). However, after 1969 (with the 137/1968 regulation norm), the construction of individual housing was allowed. During this period, membership in housing cooperatives increased enormously, from 352,900 in 1968 to nearly 1 million in 1989 (Smrčka 1992).
Cooperative housing was intended to gradually replace corporate housing by 1977 through “stabilization cooperative construction”, a specific tool which could have nearly the full financial involvement of the state. Cooperative housing construction was not only supervised by local authorities, but its extent and spatial distribution was also managed by the state. The tools used for regulation comprised of safeguarding the investment of corporation by a binding clause that stipulated a ten year obligation of employment in the organization. Šmídová metaphorically calls this relationship between the corporation and the applicant for an apartment a “housing serfdom” (Šmídová 1999, 180). The following table shows the reconfiguration of the cooperative housing sector with the advent of normalization:
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TABLE 3: Financing cooperative housing construction
Source of finance 1966-1970 1971-1975 1975-1980
State subsidies 53% 56% 56%
Membership involvement 19% 17% 18%
Bank loan 28% 28% 29%
Source: Authors calculation based on Lérová (1983).
Since it is not possible to determine the support of the membership fees by the stabilization measures in 1976, the table does not allow us to asses clearly the development of state financial control over the sector. However, the expansion of the state’s financial intervention during normalization was rather modest and started already in 1968 (Kempný et al. 1971a, 23). Details, such as actual conditions of the credit, were the only significant area of change.
Allocation practices within the cooperative housing sector were separate from allocation practices in the state housing sector. Particular cooperatives, which owned the housing to be allocated, had the task of compiling a list of applicants. The primary rule for eligibility was the membership in the cooperative, which included an initial investment and regular payments. The deciding factors for assignment of an apartment were length of the term of membership, adequacy of the assigned apartment, urgency of need (checked by the SBD), and after 1975, also the birth of a child (Dvořák 2009, 16). The apartments constructed by the stabilization program did not fall under these rules and the assignment of an apartment was decided upon solely by the investor. The allocation process was overseen by the local national council. In practice, as we shall see in chapter “Žďár nad Sázavou”, the local national council was sometimes not allowed much power.
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Individual housing construction Individual housing construction by the owner-occupier did not fall under the private ownership, and accordingly, there were strict caps on the size of the apartment. The definition of individual (in 1964, family) houses limited the floor space to 120 m2 and the number of rooms to 5 (ČSSR 1964a). Generally, the construction of individual housing was left up to the investment of the builder. However there were four forms of regulatory tools, which all had economic, social as well as political content.
The first type of regulation was the right of the local national council to grant permission for the construction of an individual house. The lack of reliable data does not permit evaluation of this type of regulatory practice. Secondly, indirect and non-monetized support could be given by the local national council in preparation for the individual housing. The third type of regulation consisted of financial support, which included relatively rare direct support by the local municipality or the granting of credit by a savings bank. Finally, support in the form of a stabilization allowance was offered by socialist organizations, primarily corporations. Support through stabilization allowance was differentiated but capped by law. An increase of these caps were granted to employees working in prioritized economic sectors (Lérová 1983, 118).
With the advent of normalization, the use and strength of financial regulations increased sharply, as we can see in table 2.
TABLE 2: The financing of individual housing construction
Source of finance 1966-1970 1971-1975 1975-1980
Stabilization grants and contributions 2% 12% 12% saving bank loans 13% 20% 24%
Builders' own sources 85% 68% 64%
Source: Authors own calculation based on Lérová (1983).
The shift in the share of private investment by the builder is evident and marks an increased space for the authorities to exert social control over personal property. The main political goals included
119 spatial distribution as well as the allocation of the workforce in industries. Since neither the stabilization grants/contributions nor the credits were a matter of legal entitlement, the expansion also meant more space for politically motivated actions and for corruption.
The shift of corporate to cooperative housing also impacted the individual housing sector by “stabilizing” grants to individual housing construction, with similar safeguards as were available in cooperative housing.
Maintenance and rent If the official texts predominantly tackled the housing construction issues, the gravity of issues concerning maintenance and modernization were of prime interest of the public, as my latter analysis of media messages and opinion surveys shows. Despite differentiation between the various housing forms, the structural settings were the dominant factor in determining maintenance problems, as a comparison with the housing field in the GDR shows (Rueschemeyer 1990). While the maintenance of individual housing fell solely on the owner-occupier, who paid no rent, the maintenance and repair of privately owned rental housing was partly managed by the local national councils beginning in the 1960s, as we have seen earlier. The capacity of private owners to handle their property was decreasing not only due to the aforementioned legal bullying, but also due to their increasing age.
The maintenance of state housing was left mostly up to the local national councils, or more precisely, on their subordinate organizations called “housing management enterprises” [podnik bytového hospodářství]. The funding of these enterprises was meant to be based on incomes from rent, but the low level of income from rent caused them to be reliant primarily on subsidies from the national councils. This paradox is nicely captured in Irena Lérová’s (1983) official scholarly text on housing economics. Lérová describes how the initial ideological definition of the funding for these “housing management enterprises” found in the law47 is turned upside down by the addition of a description of the actual mechanism by which the coverage of a loss greater than 50% was managed in the books of national councils in advance. The price of the rent was explicitly a matter of social
47 “The incomes of these housing management enterprises mostly come from the rents.” (Lérová 1983, 118). 120 policy and included further reductions in price based on number of children and mild increases levels for “oversized” apartments and extra equipment.
The maintenance of the cooperative housing was covered by the rent paid by the cooperative member who occupied the apartment. Since the state was not willing to subsidize the maintenance costs or repairs and renovations, the rent was high compared to state housing. This problem was defined as a public one already in 1960s, but the proposed alternative to low-cost rents in state housing in order to harmonize the two forms of occupancy was determined to be politically unviable by normalization (cf. Hůla 1971). Though the existence of this problem was recognized by the party- state even later (Kempný et al. 1971b, 46) and despite the official expert opinion (Lérová 1983, 85– 87), it reemerged as a viable alternative again in the late 1980s (Císař 1988). To offer a picture of the differences, the difference in rent for various housing forms in 1978 is shown in table 4.
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TABLE 4: Distribution of monthly rents
Number of occupiers (in %)
Cooperative Monthly rent paid in Kč State housing housing
0 to 100 15,6 3,7
100 to 149 20 10,3
150 to199 19,5 17
200 to 299 27,5 33,5
300 to 399 15 18,9
400 to 499 2,1 15,1
500 to 599 0,2 1,4
600 to 699 0,1 0,1
Source: Lérová (1983)
The overview of the structure of the housing sector clearly reveals several important trends:
a) A (re)establishment of relatively disparate subsectors with specific forms of financing, allocation rules, ownership rights and maintenance forms. b) increased incentives for construction forms that involved private initiative c) The existence of the two contradicting forces of “appropriation” and “alienation” of housing
This sectorisation,48 as I shall call this process, had number of political, social and economic effects that are worthy of attention. The political effects, including first and foremost the application of the
48 My understanding of sectorization is distinct to the ways it was defined in the debate on policy making in pluralist and corporatist system, though it shares certain common features. In the theory of corporatism, sectorization is understood as “a relationship between a State agency and a single interest” (Jordan a Schubert 1992, 22).
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“divide and pacify” strategy, will be discussed in the concluding chapter. Still, I shall preliminarily point out some aspects of this differentiation which were not necessarily intentional, such as the difference between rents as analyzed above. On the other hand, other aspects were highly desirable, such as stratification of what Šafr later calls quasi-classes of housing (Šafr 2007). In the Housing policy, the party-state even supported sectorization through its steps and non-decision to equalize these different groups. The stratification principle did not copy a socio-economic principle in this sense as Lérová has shown (Lérová 1983, 85). In this context, sectorization meant real social transformation, not retrogression. However, stratification principles were constructed intentionally by housing policy only to a certain degree. While political loyalty played a certain role, the role of family networks and the black market was likely neither planned nor desired. Other policy goals, such as drawing the increasing savings from the economy by creating incentives for investment into housing were definitely fulfilled.
How to get an apartment-allocation rules and principles
“To realize such measures that would increase the awareness about the objective nature of distribution of apartments” [realizovat taková opatření, která by zvětšila vědomí o objektivitě v přidělování bytů] (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 50).
There were number of ways for an individual to acquire a dwelling. The rules for the allocation of housing were set by number of legal norms; however for real existing socialism, the law č.41/1964 constituted the basic principles, which were only amended later. The diagram below shows these procedures. But the global picture will only be complete if we combine these general procedures with a picture of the forms of housing and types of housing construction. The principles of social urgency and the length of membership varied over time.
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DIAGRAM 4: How to get an apartment
Source: Author.
The case of individual housing for personal use was the most straightforward- it could have been an inherited dwelling, or it could have been bought or built. Construction had to be approved by the local national committee and was completed by self-help. The case of cooperative housing also the possibility of contracted construction (which was more common), while the inheritance and transfers of membership (and occupancy) were more limited in comparison to in personal ownership (Dvořák 2009, 18–19). The exchange of apartments within the cooperative sector was allowed and
124 administered by the cooperatives themselves. For individual members, the system of allocation was based on waiting lists and the allocation principles were not set by the law, but by a decree of the union of cooperatives. The convergence to state housing was also confirmed by the national committee in its supervisory role. The system allowed for a lot of leeway, and so communal criticism about open corruption (Měško 1972a) or “just” weird criteria about waiting lines (i.e., the first person past the post literally received the apartment) (Labudová 1982) even reached the official press.
The corporate or service apartments were administered by the corporation. The distribution of such apartments, though legally done by the national committee based on the proposal of the corporation proposal (ČSSR 1964b), was allocated in practice solely by the organizations that had the dwellings at their disposal (see chapter Žďár nad Sázavou). Theoretically, corporate housing was closely connected with employment. In practice, however, the vacation of a corporate apartment was often complicated, since the duty to offer substitute housing was up to the national committee. The national committee, needed to have substitute housing, some desire to offer it and meet the rule of adequacy. No other transactions, such as inheritance, were allowed.
Legal principles based on the conception of personal use opened three paths to get a state apartment. The first way was to get the apartment through the national committee, which managed the particular dwelling. Another way was to “inherit it”, which was possible only if the legal heir was listed as a member of the household. Legally, this was not a process of inheritance, but a transfer of the right to use the apartment. Šmídová used the pertinent term of “quasi-inheritance” to describe the practice properly (Šmídová 1996, 117). The consequences of this unusual practice will be discussed in the concluding chapter, but to sum up, it created incentives to cheat or play complicated games with housing and family ties. Finally, there was the option to legally buy the apartment, which was already discussed in “How to get an apartment”. However, it was possible to also illegally “purchase” the right of personal use to the apartment on the black market. The extent of the black market is hard to even estimate, but its expansion during the normalization period was noticed both by scholars (Musil 1992b; Musil 2006, 259) as well as by the official Czechoslovak press of that time (cf. Smola 1988; Smola 1988; CSTV 1972; Kubic 1972; Unknown 1982). The recognition of the expansion of the black market by the official Czechoslovak press marks its undeniable and evident role in the real existing socialism. Hegedüs and Tosics as well as Musil call the shadow territory of the black market an exit zone out of the bureaucratic system and even assess it as a quasi-market (Hegedüs and Tosics 1996; Musil 1992b).
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State housing, which even after the implementation the Housing document remained the ideal form, came a long way from its very general allocation principles to include extensive interpretative amendments, which specified the preferences of the regime. As we have already concluded that the state housing and its allocation principles is the most revealing and theoretically important category, let me offer an abbreviated version of the development of its framework.
As in the case of other forms of housing, the grounding principles for state housing were laid down in 1964 by the law on the management of the housing stock (ČSSR 1964b). The duty of the management of the state housing stock was given to the national committees. The law stated that the management of housing stock should be “just and effective“ and include the wide participation of workers. In our analysis, let us be guided about the principles of “just“ allocation as they were legally set. In congruence with the trend set by the housing document, the state housing stock was primarily aimed at “families with lower incomes and families with a ‘larger‘ number of children“. The national committees were to create waiting lists of applicants for the state housing stock. Waiting lists were a just a precondition for the actual assignment of an apartment. For those already on the waiting list, the ruling principle of the assignment was appropriateness of the number of rooms and surface are of the apartment, with no further specification. In addition to assignment through waiting lists, there were specific types of applicants, who were given preferential treatment. I find the definition of these preferred groups essential for understanding the intentions of the housing activities of the regime in the social welfare domain. Therefore, a detailed account of the expansion and specification of these groups follows in order to analyze these intentions.49
The preferred group of apartment dwellers was originally defined by state interest. This included foreign diplomats, high ranking state officials such as government members, members of the presidium of parliamentary bodies or heads of county national committees. Perhaps the most bizarre category included “prominent artists, that come to smaller industrial settlements and to villages, and who get a certification about their artistic qualification by the authorized organization.” According to the argumentation of the proposer in parliament, these groups were the result of an intentional reduction of the previously much larger privileges in the nomenclature, i.e. a larger eligible group of preferred applicants (NS RČS 1964a, 2). Though the privileges of artists were a matter of parliamentary debate, I cannot offer any credible explanation except for the special role of
49 There are in fact three groups of preferred applicants. The first, which I neglect in the later text, is defined as first time applicants, who have legally transformed a non-residential space into an apartment. The third are applicants, who are voluntarily leaving their state-owned apartment. I neglect this group as well, since it seems that its significance is negligible as well, both regarding its extent and its social and political meaning. 126 the official, approved and certified artists in the public life of communist Czechoslovakia.50 By this law, the government was given the power to further interpret the meaning of the state interest through amendments.
By no surprise, the first and the most significant contribution to the reinterpretation of the state’s interest in housing came right after the normalizers’ seizure of power in the CP, in April 1969. The governmental decree (Vláda ČSSR 1969a) expanded the preferred group enormously to include all interested persons, who were “leading functionaries of political and public life, whose housing situation is not settled yet”. This expansion was complemented by the vacation of service apartments by former functionaries, who had to leave their apartments due to resignation. The artistic group incorporated important scientists and sportsmen. The purity of the political intent in consolidating the ranks of the party-state is striking, especially given the limited attention paid to non-privileged groups: the remaining categories included unlawfully prosecuted citizens and families with newborn twins, who were either living in unhealthy conditions or did not have their own apartment. To ensure the set of privileges expected the most important part of nomenclature, by a decree 88/1970 Sb. from August 1970, judges, prosecutors and higher ranks of police were lifted into preferred group (Vláda ČSR 1970). The further enlargement of the group, which grew to include by medical staff in a few specified regions in 1985 and the newly recruited employees in a number of underdeveloped regions (listed in the decree) in 1986 (Vláda ČSR 1986), point to the emergency goals in the spatial distribution of workforce.
The legal frame thus created a two-track system for the allocation of the available state housing stock. The first track was through benefits for the privileged and the second presented a sort of social housing (though no such name was used) for low-income families. The interpretation of social justice required by the law in 1964 could hardly be more straightforward in revealing the strategy of normalization. Stabilization of the party-state by publicly offering bonuses for loyalty had its consequence, as public opinion later showed. The underlying values and priorities, especially compared to the relative austerity of the 1960s, are clear. In order to establish the aforementioned iconic “peace to work”, the most important group for the functioning of the state party had to be catered to. Other welfare goals were secondary and the privileges did not have to be concealed. Support for low-income families, as we shall see in the local practice in Žďár nad Sázavou, should not
50 On the role of artists from 1960s and 1970, cf. Bren (2010). 127 be neglected or denied, since it did not depart far from welfare state measures. The differences, such as its unusual rendition of means testing, will be discussed in concluding chapter. The spatial regulation of workforce, a concern added to the allocation process in state housing in mid-1980s, is interesting especially for its evident clumsiness. It illustrates the general observation that problems of coordination in centralized communist systems were cured by measures that even increased the level of centralization.
We have seen that the intention to use low rents in state housing to meet the social needs of low income families was actually failing in the 1980s. Even the official experts were critical of its function and the resulting increase in inequalities. With the sectorization hypothesis pointing to the roots of the policy of divide and pacify in the social welfare domain, we can see another meaning in these preferences of allocation. Whether it shakes the hypothesis shaken or reinforces it shall be discussed in the concluding chapter. However, it is necessary to check the actual application of these measures at the level on which the state housing was actually managed.
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Žďár nad Sázavou
“It is necessary to record and document all the changes in a detailed way, so that the future inhabitants become aware of what this period provided for local people, and how the life changed in this once poor locality.” (“Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 3 page 10, 1974)
Žďár nad Sázavou (henceforth Ždár) strikes every visitor with its high proportion of prefabs, the brutal architectural conception of its main square combining set of historical houses with 1970– 1980s concrete buildings, and by the very visible presence of its industrial plants within the city or in its vicinity. The first impression of a “beacon of real-existing socialism” is accomplished, but the process of selecting this case for this thesis, both on theoretical and practical level, did not start by a visit, and so the operationalization of the selection criteria must first be revealed. Second, a short historical overview of the development of this Sozialist Musterstadt (Paragon socialist city), as Lozoviuk (2004) calls it, prepares ground for the section on the history of housing policy in Ždár. A detailed analysis of the satisfaction of needs in housing policy is the core part of this study, but to understand the dynamics and principles of the allocation mechanism of housing, the functioning of the national committee as the administrator of this process must be introduced. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the results of analysis and the various limitations that follow.
The choice of Ždár for my fieldwork followed not only theoretical but also practical concerns. The chapter on the methodology of this thesis has already given the rationale for the case selection including the criteria to support this rationale. The theoretical selection process started with the identification of a set of cases with the highest relative increase in number of inhabitants combined with the highest rise in the number of houses, which indicate both a large share of non-private (socialist) housing stock and a partial correspondence to the presence of upward mobility. Together, this indicator could also exclude cities with a high proportion of housing stock inherited from pre- communist times. The raw data provided by the Statistical Office needed to be checked in order to remove the cases where the increase was generated by merging more cadastral units into one. Also, sites with a low number of citizens per dwelling or house were excluded, since we can assume that this would indicate a higher proportion of individual housing. A set of cities was created and then contacted, in order to check the availability of the necessary archival material. The criteria of loyalty, the level to which the region was favored in economic and political terms, and the low level of incidence of political dissidence required individual examination.
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The accessibility of sources necessary for studying certain cases became a major obstacle during the case selection. The key archival collection with the potential to offer insight into the daily practice of the satisfaction of the housing needs contains material related to the housing committees that were set up by national committees. However, these particular collections do not fall into the category of archival material that must be preserved according to the effective law on archival services (ČR 2004), and so the retention or discarding of these collections is decided by the authorized archive. The level to which these types of collections were discarded could indicate both the sensitivity of the issue (the normalization period was usually missing) and the relatively low historical value ascribed to this type of documents by the archival community. The extent to which Žďár fulfilled these criteria will be discussed throughout this chapter.
As Lustick pointed out, it is important to recognize “the fact that background narratives are constructed, not discovered, and that they carry theoretical and perspectival commitments which raise significant problems for, and can invalidate, the use of history as a laboratory for social science.“ (Lustick 1996, 616) For this reason, I have used various sources in order to perform triangulation and in order to mitigate, as much as possible, the bias stemming from the fact that implicit theories and generalizations (C. L. Becker and Snyder 1967, 54) are usually impossible to recognize in single source or a single type of source.
The archival sources I have used include the Chronicle of Žďár nad Sázavou, a source of political and social information. A general duty to keep records in chronicle form originates in 1920. After the communist putsch, the local national committees were obliged to politicize the records by naming a chronicler, who is “devoted the popular democratic order and who ensures a proper records by his political maturity and general knowledge.” The chronicle is thus an official source prone to political changes, as we shall see later. A source similar to the chronicle are publications produced even after 1989 by Švoma and Filík, employees of the Regional museum of Žďár nad Sázavou. These publications are considered to be an official source for two reasons, the first being Švoma and Filík’s reliance on the chronicles and the second being the continuity of their official role as regional historiographers (cf. Filka and Švoma 2005; Švoma and Filka 1998; Houf and Švoma 1989). The most ideological picture is drawn by Konzbul with an expressive foreword by Rudolf Hegenbart, whose successful political career in the communist regime ended in the power group of the CP, as we shall see in a later section (Konzbul 1975).
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For various reasons, while there are a variety of critical studies on Žďár available, the most important group makes use of the extensive anthropological research into the daily life in real-existing socialism in Žďár. This research includes collection of over 80 interviews that were conducted in 2003–2005 under the supervision of Petr Lozoviuk (“Forschungsverbund Ost- und Südosteuropa“ 2013). Regional and sociological studies also touched upon different aspects of Žďár, such as the industrialization of the 1950s (Olivová 2013; Porsch 2006) or socialist festivities in Žďár (Sobotková 2011). The archival research is comprised mostly of collections of the archival committee and of local national committee, both of which lack any search tools, or even an inventory. Accordingly, I use a specific reference system in the relevant section. Generally, Žďár turned out to be a relatively popular object of study within different scientific disciplines, which definitely proved to be an advantage. However, there is no study analyzing either policy or politics during the communist regime in Žďár or the region.
The History of Žďár: city, industry, politics Ždár is a city on the border between the Bohemian and Moravian parts of the Czech Republic. Today, it is a regional center, and a county seat in the Vysočina region. It was first mentioned in 1293 as being located next to a Cistercian monastery founded in 1252. In the late medieval period, it became peripheral, while its renewed development came with the construction of a monastery in the 18th century. From the 19th century, when the reliable censuses started, the number of its inhabitants fluctuated around 4,000. The city entered the communist period as a peripheral settlement with a largely agrarian population in an agricultural region, as well as a shoemaker tradition. Its potential lied in its strategic position on the railway connecting the Bohemian capital of Prague with the Moravian capital of Brno. A major landmark in its political history was the symbolic 1928 visit of T.G. Masaryk, the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, which was commemorated with a Czechoslovak stamp. Its remembrance today forms an integral part of rebuilding the non-communist identity of Žďár (cf. Švoma and Filka 1998; “Historie | Žďár nad Sázavou“ 2013; “Stručná historie Žďáru nad Sázavou“ 2013). Another strong element of its contemporary identity from the pre-communist times is its Baroque architecture, originally all ecclesiastical, built by a renowned Czech architect of Italian origin Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel.51 Today, Žďár has about 22,000 inhabitants.
51 (cf. “santini žďár - Hledat Googlem“ 2013; “Významné památky | Žďár nad Sázavou“ 2013; Filka a Švoma 2005) 131
The Communist Regime in the “City on the Roof of Europe”52 The advent of the communist regime was not met with extremely favorable grounds in the old city of Žďár. For this reason, the official socialist historiography begins in 1944, when a growth of the communist anti-Nazi partisan movement began in the region (Konzbul 1975). The liberation of the country by the Red Army in 1945 was repeatedly celebrated in the entire communist Czechoslovakia. The agricultural and mostly Catholic region became a stronghold of the popular party after WWII. The city was affected by the emigration of about 20% of its inhabitants to the newly vacated borderlands (Filka and Švoma 2005, 17),53 which was a result of the expulsion of approximately three million Czech Germans. The damage of housing due to the war was relatively small, with around 5% of housing affected (“Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 2 page 220). According to official historiography, as a “a corrupt and disgusting reactionary game began” (Konzbul 1975, 32) by the non-communist parties, the Communist party—already a leading force nationwide—was able to secure its victory by gerrymandering just before elections. To this end, the City of Ždár was merged with Zámek Žďár, which was the village around the former monastery later turned into a castle. The limited strength of the local CP was boosted by its “extended arms” (Konzbul 1975, 42), social organizations that penetrated the other parties, first and foremost the popular party. The extent of opposition to the domination of the CP, at least as part of the official narrative, returned in late 1960s. The today’s name “Žďár nad Sázavou” was a result of and administrative merge of City of Ždár with Zámek Žďár in 1949 and 1950 (Kružík 2001).
52 (“Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 3, page 456) 53Olivová states even 30% (2013, 75). 132
The communist period, when assessed officially by the CP itself in an iconic book written in 1974, divides its development into three phases: the building of socialism (1948-1960); a mixed period of a) the building of a developed socialist society, b) a period of crisis development in party and in the society, and c) a period of consolidation of situation after the April plenum of the CCCP in 1969; and finally, the fulfillment of the tasks given by the XIV Congress of the Communist Party (Konzbul 1975).
The socialist building began with a strategic decision by the headquarters of the CP to create an industrial metallurgical plant in the city in 1949 (Švoma and Filka 1998, 101). According to the official history, its placement in Žďár was motivated not only by an endeavor to address the region’s lagging development at the industrialization level, but also in regards to “national defense and domestic and international political situation […] and infrastructure.” (Konzbul 1975, 59). The archival documents seem to support a combination of social and political goals.54 Opened in 1951, the plant rapidly changed the city by drawing an enormous influx of workers (as shown in table 5). The “Žďárské strojírny a válcovny” [The Žďár engineering plants and rolling mills] (ŽĎAS) quickly became the dominant employer and also dominant provider of housing, as we shall see.
TABLE 5: Number of residents of Žďár
Year of census 1950 1961 1970 1980 1991 Number of permanent inhabitants 4936 10305 15686 20864 23191
Source: Kronika města Žďáru nad Sázavou
Originally a very small provincial city without any tradition of industry and with nearly no trained workforce, Žďár had doubled in the number of inhabitants within the span of only ten years. Due to an increase in the arrival of young families, an “explosion of the population started to overgrow the city,” (Švoma and Filka 1998, 128) at a rate three times faster than the natural growth of population compared to the Czech part of Czechoslovakia.55 This overgrowth lagged acutely behind the development of infrastructure, brought about an enormous demand for services including housing,
54 Viz. The Founding Charter of ŽĎAS produced by the Ministry of Industry in March 19, 1948 as reprinted in (Olivová 2013, 85) . 55 Own calculation based on (Mička 1985; “Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 3 page 254; and Filka a Švoma 2005, 128). 133 and also caused a cultural shock. The immediate result of this grand experiment on a small scale had an immediate impact on the quality of management and production of ŽĎAS, resulting in a large fluctuation and high level of waste, not to mention lagging behind the plan. All of these problems so undeniably grave that even the official narrative had to incorporate them (Konzbul 1975, 62–63). According to the chronicle of the city, the structure of employment in 1959 was excessively industrial: 800 inhabitants worked in agriculture, 7,000 in industry, and 3,000 in services (“Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 3 page 456), which also shows that services were seriously undervalued.
This domination of industry influenced the policy and politics of the city, since links of ŽĎAS to the headquarters were much stronger, with their chief manager frequently being a member56 of the CCCP as well. The domination naturally affected the housing policy of the City National Committee. The building phase of socialism was also reflected in changes of street names and the names of the newly built housing estates: Stalingrad, Marshall Stalin’s Avenue, etc. The phase of building socialism closed with an important increase in political and administrative position of Žďár. In 1959, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Moravian Jihlavský kraj (region), and its standing as a county seat was boosted by redrawing the county lines. As a consequence, Žďár became the seat of the third largest county by number of inhabitants (Švoma and Filka 1998, 100).
56 The chronicler adopted significant normalization using phrases like “enemies of our socialist order” or “provoked hysteria” just in notes on 1970, but still his devotion was not satisfying and he was forced to resign by 1971.(“Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 3, page 428).
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In the 1960s, the population boom and expansion of the state enterprise ŽĎAS continued, but the political climate changed with some liberalization brought by the newly elected president of the local national committee Antonín Kubeš, who was later replaced by Ivan Chalupa. Despite the increase in the local significance of Žďár, due to the administrative changes and to ŽĎAS, Žďár remained peripheral compared to regional centers. Its peripheral status became relevant during the 1968 discussion initiated by the Moravian branches of the CP concerning the possible federalization of Czechoslovakia into three parts: Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia, instead of the actual development into a two-member federation (cf. Švoma and Filka 1998, 115).
Reform and consolidation
The reform process was not particularly planned. However, official sources draw a portrait of “survival of pockets of numerous small bourgeois holding nationalist, ‘masarikist’ and clericalist traditions,” (Konzbul 1975, 64) that were not uprooted. Also, due to delays in the hot phase of normalization, it seems that the ideas about these problematic “pockets” were relatively realistic. Membership in the CP was well above the national level with 17% of inhabitants in Žďár compared to the overall 11% membership level observed in the rest of Czechoslovakia . The occupation itself was hard to swallow for the local population (cf. Štverák 2010; Mička 1985).57 The signs of the stumbling character of the normalization are numerous, from late resignation of the President of the National Committee Ivan Chalupa, who left to take part in the screening process in the early 1970
57The membership of the popular party amounted to 174 members.(cf. Štverák 2010; Mička 1985; “Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 374) 135 through slow normalization of the language of the local chronicler to difficulties admitted by the official narrative: even the intervention of brotherly forces in 1968 did not bring order.58
The resistance to the new order was also matched by increased pressure from headquarters. That included personal visit by Josef Korčák on 11 July 1969; President Ludvík Svoboda 26 June 1970, himself a native of the region; and the power transformation of the county headquarters of the CP by hardliners Ján Maruš, Rudolf Hegenbart, and Jan Frýbort (Konzbul 1975, 156). The results are difficult to measure, but at least reading the change from a sign of formal approval with the normalization order, a membership in the Union of the Czechoslovak-Soviet Companionship [Svaz Československo-sovětského přátelství], the consolidation of the normalization regime was finally successful.59 In the City National Committee, its president Ivan Chalupa resigned in 1970 and Antonín Bubák, a former employee of ŽĎAS, was elected. Later, Antonín Bubák became a symbol of normalization and conversion of the city into a socialist one.60 As a consequence of the “reorganization” of the national committee, Antonín Bubák was confirmed in his function in 1971 unanimously following elections where “just few individual did not vote by acclamation.” (“Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“, book 3, page 428).
58 While this being - characteristically - the only mention of the invasion in the whole Konzbul’s book (1975, 151). 59 By 1980, the membership of the Union exceeded the Czechoslovak levels by a fifth.(cf. Mička 1985; and Švoma a Filka 1998, 205) 60 (Beseda 2010, 65–66) 136
Full reconciliation and integration into the power structures of the national party was crowned by the election of the director of ŽĎAS Eduard Saul (director in the years 1972–1980) into the CCCP.61 Later, in 1981, Saul even became Minister of Metallurgy and mechanical engineering in Štrougal’s Czechoslovak government. Similar integration of Rudolf Hegenbart, a former head of the CP corporate organization in ŽĎAS, became the head of the county committee of the CP in 1976 and later rose in ranks up to become a deputy prime minister,62 and eventually the head of the Committee for State Administration of the CCCP in 1988.63 The decline in the strength of these ties in 1980s suggests the waning prestige of Žďár.
To summarize the fitness of Žďár according to the criteria set in the methodological part, one has to allow the flexibility associated with the nature of archival research as described by Scott64 and Hill.65 Regarding the specialization transformed by the communist regime, Žďár complies fully. The same situation is found in the large non-private housing stock and volatility of the region, including upward mobility. The peripheral character of the city is undeniable. It is, in fact, an intersection
61 (Štverák 2010, 409) 62 (redakce 1987) 63 (“Personální složení oddělení státní administrativy (tzv. XIII. oddělení) ÚV KSČ - Ústav pro studium totalitních režimů“ 2013; cf. Ústav 2005, 109–139) 64 (J. Scott 1990) 65 (Hill 1993, 5) 137 between the peripheral regions of Bohemia and of Moravia. In the case of the stronghold of the CP, the picture is a bit less convincing. On one hand, there is the unsmooth character of the advance of normalization. We can also add the cleavage between the “autochthonous” and “allochthonous” residents. However, the dominance of normalization controlwas accepted, at least on the surface, and favored position of Žďár came with the networking at individual level between the center and Žďár from 1976. While I have not found much evidence of dissenting voices after 1971, apart from the “communal critique” The fact that Žďár was awarded a title “The City of the 30th anniversary of the Liberation of the ČSSR by the Soviet Army” [Město 30. osvobození ČSSR sovětskou armádou] in 197666 also reveals its exemplary character in the eyes of the regime and is tightly associated with the extent of the “socialist commitment movement” and “Action ‘Z’” in Žďár (see more in housing in Žďár).
66 Nationwide award associated with a 500, 000 Czech crown bonus. "Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou", book 4, page 110.
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A retrospective view from 1990 that has already been discussed in the scholarly literature (cf. Kocian 2005; Balík, Šedo, and Holzer 2005) as a an approximate potential source of information about support of different social groups and parties in late 1980s. It is assumed that path-dependent preferences “hidden” in uncontested elections of the period of communist rule could be traced in free elections in 1990. Analysis of the results presented in table 6 show that the official propaganda might not have missed the mark when it warned against pockets of clericalism and rightist deviation. If we compare the results of parliamentary election into the Chamber of Nations of the Federal Assembly (the federation of Czechoslovakia had its separate two-chamber parliament while the Chamber of the Nations was the most powerful parliamentary body), some of the assumptions about social trends specific to Žďár would be supported—by far not proven, as the method is not able to support any causality.
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TABLE 6: Resuls in the general elections in 1990
1990 Elections Žďár Czech Republic share of number votes number share of Party of votes (%) of votes votes (%) difference Občanské fórum [Civic forum] 29396 34,75% 3851172 53,15% -18,40% Křesťanská a demokratická unie 17915 629359 [Christian Democrats] 21,18% 8,69% 12,49% Hnutí za sam.dem.-Sp.Mor.a Sl. 12244 572015 [Moravian Patriots] 14,47% 7,89% 6,58% Komunistická strana Českoslov. 10268 976996 [Communist Party] 12,14% 13,48% -1,35% Spojenectví zeměděl.a venkova [Alliance of Farmers and the 5572 273175 Countryside] 6,59% 3,77% 2,82% Sociální demokracie [Social 3143 278280 Democrats] 3,72% 3,84% -0,13% Strana zelených [Green Party] 1974 2,33% 224432 3,10% -0,76%
Čs.strana socialistická 1837 2,17% 199446 2,75% -0,58%
Volební seskup.zájm.svazů v ČR 570 0,67% 47971 0,66% 0,01% Všelid.dem.str.,Sdruž.pro rep. 545 0,64% 67781 0,94% -0,29% Svobodný blok 496 0,59% 57925 0,80% -0,21% Hnutí za občanskou svobodu 270 0,32% 21585 0,30% 0,02% Hnutí čs.porozumění 198 0,23% 8032 0,11% 0,12% Čs.demokratické fórum 144 0,17% 22866 0,32% -0,15% Soužití a maď.kr.-dem.hnutie 19 0,02% 5472 0,08% -0,05% Strana přátel piva 0 0,00% 8943 0,12% -0,12% Total 84591 100,00% 7245450 100,00% 0,20% note: participation rate 98,59% in Žďár nad Sázavou, total participation rate 96,79%; election results of elections to the Chamber of Nations of the Federal Assembly
Source: Authors own calculations based on www.volby.cz (Czech Statistical Office)
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The difference between the national results and the local election results indicate some latent support for the popular party (Christian Democrats) from the previous period. Even the social transformation and the glorious development of the originally “poor city” did not allow the Communist party to get better results than the average one. The support for the Moravian patriotic party might indicate a shift in identity towards Moravia, but the average results of the party in the region at large (Jihomoravský kraj: 27,25%) corrects this hypothesis. The concern with the potential created by the unsmooth normalization also might have some real grounds; the reformer Ivan Chalupa, who was purged from the CP in 1970, returned as one of the leaders of the Civic Movement during the first days of the Velvet Revolution (Kopčáková 2009). In the sense of the stronghold of the CP, Žďár thus fits relatively from 1971 to the early 1980s.
Housing in Žďár The character of housing policy in Žďár was determined by many specific local factors. Apart from the legal, political and policy environment, which was analyzed in the preceding chapters, there were specific economic, social, political and administrative factors as well as ideological and architectural conceptions and capacities that shaped its actual performance, so let me shortly look at the most important.
The transformation of a postwar settlement of a mostly village character into a locally important city proceeded in waves. The most important factor of the development was the establishment and
141 development of ŽĎAS. Apart from enormous housing construction, which mostly took shape of housing estates, a large and ambitious redevelopment or transformation of the older parts, especially the historic inner city, co-determined the housing policy of Žďár.
Two important aspect that associated the regime with the local housing policy in Žďár were the “socialist commitment movement” [závazkové hnutí] and “Action ‘Z'” (Akce ‘Z’, with the Z standing for improvement). In the “socialist commitment movement”, different groups, corporations and social organizations publicly offered a surplus to the planned activities. Though no comparative frame is available, these extra commitments present an important element in the socialist self- perception as captured in the official literature on Žďár and in its chronicle (Konzbul 1975; “Kronika Žďár nad Sázavou“; Porsch 2006, cf.). Where the commitments had mostly symbolic functions, “Akce ‘Z’” became a practical tool. Generally, it was a self-help initiative organized by national committees and included not just improvements of public spaces, but also construction of “civic facilities” (Ghosh 2011, 95). From practical point of view, in Žďár, “Akce ‘Z’” became a matter of pride, but also an indirect obligation, sign of loyalty and an important supplementary fund of the off-budget resources for construction. The hypothetically voluntary basis of participation was in practice a source of social control, since it became a precondition to social entitlements, such as the placement of children into nursery school, as Beseda reports (2010, 62). As we shall see in the example of the housing commission, even the politically engaged citizens were not able to evade methods of soft pressure by Antonín Bubák, reportedly the local driving force of the likely extraordinary scale of “Akce ‘Z’”
According to the census conducted in 1991, a year after the fall of the communist regime, the share of former “socialist form of ownership” (municipal and coop) was as high as 74%.
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TABLE 7: Forms of housing in Žďár in 1991
1991 apartments Share national committee 2639 31% other organization 555 7% Coop 3036 36%
Private forms 2158 26% Total 8388 100%
"socialist" total 6230 74%
Source: Author’s own calculation based on Federal Statistical Office (Sčítání lidu, domů a bytů k 3. 3. 1991. Obyvatelstvo, domy, byty a domácnosti: Město Žďár nad Sázavou 1992, 71).
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Housing needs and their catering to:
The allocation procedures at the lowest level
The analytical procedures I employed with the core archival material of the housing committee basically followed documentary analysis. First, with the help of a pre-interview with the archival employee, I checked the quality of the records and their extent. Their authenticity and credibility was checked against the known administrative procedures and through examining the communication between the supervising body (local national committee, but also county national committee) and the housing committee, which included regular reports, checks and examinations. I prepared a list of questions for to be “applied” on the documents following the “quasi-interview method” described in the chapter on methodology. The formulation of questions started with assembling a set of general topics, such as clientelism and corruption, political and social interests in play within the allocation process etc. These topics were operationalized using the local context established by a literature review and also the context of housing policy employing the results of my previous analysis. Though I have described the housing committee as an institution where the norms are applied, due to relatively general nature of the norm and the profound lack of evidence that connected these norms with the application, I reconstructed a model of the allocation procedure and analyzed its nature and function. A very valuable tool for analysis of the collection of documents became a set of principles of the workings of the housing committee combined with an inductive list of the functions that were actually performed. I compiled this list as a catalogue that included expressions and arguments used to substantiate decisions. With the help of this list, the meagerness of the “interviewee” was reduced.
I employed an iterative process of open (exploratory), axial and selective coding, in order to find the implicit rationale of the policy making and also to offer reliable answers to the posed questions. In spite of the mechanical, relatively standardized character of most of the documents, a semantic probe into the activities opened some space for understanding of the nature and dynamics of the allocation process and of the supervisory role of the commission. The accuracy, reliability and relevance are a matter of the set of documents was checked against other sources in a constant comparison. Finally, I have utilized my theoretical framework to discuss the results in the sense of the construction of housing needs, their satisfaction, and the functions covered by these activities in the welfare domain. The framework was essential not only to assess the activities the housing commission performed, but also other potential measures that theoretically fell under the
144 jurisdiction of the commission but were not realized. The extent of the available archival material allows me to analyze only the years 1966 to 1978. However, it still opens space for analysis of the advent of normalization.
The role of the commission: an institutional legal frame The role of the housing committee was defined legally by norms specifying the position of national committees. The system of national committees was invented during the WWII as a provisional and, to some extent, extra-constitutional type of administrative body combining the state administration with local administration. The provisional structure was turned into a permanent one, and national committees became part of the “democratic centralism”, in other words, they became an integral part of the party-state hierarchy. With relatively minor changes from 1948, the establishment of legal provision valid throughout normalization was executed by law č.69/1967 on national committees. This norm did not alter the nature of the hierarchical role of the national committees: it stated that the national committees are “consolidating the socialist societal order under the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia” (par.2). The novelty of the norm was in the definition of ownership right and the power of the delegates of the committee. Another marked change was a shift from direct subordination to government into theoretically more independent role, forming a mixed or, as Bennet calls it, fused model (1997) of self-governance.67 The hierarchy of the national committees was the following:
I. a category including regional national committees and important cities (according to the governmental decision);
II. a category comprising seats of counties and settlements with urban characteristics (based on the decision of the regional national committees); and the
III. a category of the remaining committees (local and municipal) (Schelle 2009, 203–207).
Prague and its districts were treated by a separate law. The tasks of local and municipal national councils included securing “complex economic and social development”, in particular construction in cities and villages and improvement of housing conditions and services. It had the duty to manage the housing stock. The executive power of the national committee lied in an elected counsel, while the highest powers were held by plenary sessions. The commissions, including housing, were elected by plenary sessions from proposals by mass organizations, while the head of a commission had to be
67 The independence is discussed thoroughly by Vedral (2009) 145 elected from the deputies. The deputies themselves were appointed through local elections in a highly orchestrated manner identical to the procedures of general elections. The administrative branch of the national committee consisted of divisions including a construction division that had its duties in the housing sector and cooperated with housing commission.
Analysis In Žďár, the housing commission consisted of six members. It proposed the occupancy of state “housing stock managed by the city in a just way”; it was in charge of permitting exchanges of housing, borrowing housing, and of dealing with complaints connected with housing. The housing stock limits forced the commission to state openly that the housing stock is intended only for “clearances, demolitions and cases of social needs” in 1966, while the rest of the applicants should be “persuaded to take part in coop housing construction”. It compiled “waiting lists” (seznam uchazečů), which was one source of the final “assignee list” (pořadník) used for the actual allocation. It had a right to “investigate” in apartments and other housing facilities, in order to check accuracy of given information. Apart from these set roles, it also sent recommendations to the city council and occasionally reprimanded citizens. As we shall see, it occasionally used measures of a disciplinary nature. The commission was supervised by the planning department of the regional council and by the council of the city national committee. Together with the planning and investment departments, it was called “the housing section”.
The bureaucratic routine included yearly plans of work, meetings at least bi-annual, monthly, (or more frequent) reports, descriptions of waiting lists and some fragmentary statistics. Then, the committee exchanged correspondence with the council of the city national committee, invited guests or was visited by officials.
The key for allocation was a written application submitted to the housing commission. Neither the filled forms nor the blank is part of the archival collection, so I my assumptions about its character are based only on scattered partial references in the minutes of the commission. It definitely included names, dates of birth, current and previous occupations and employers, which must all be proven by a certificate issued by the employer. The financial status of the applicant was checked by current wage, amount of savings and ownership of real estates. The description of current housing conditions was the most important information. Some specific arguments, such as the unhealthy 146 sanitary conditions in the housing at that time, undermined health of the residents or the fact of eviction had to be proven by an official authority (e.g., public health office, local doctor, or court order).
The domain of the housing commission was rather restricted. Its archival funds do not allow us to create a complete picture, but supplemented with the less reliable data of the chronicle and especially with the textual portion of the archival collection, it is possible to make some inferences. As we can see in table 8, the number of assigned housing based on waiting lists ranged from 20 to 139 annually. Preferred groups were sometimes added to waiting lists, but mostly kept just in the assignee list (which largely corresponded with the final assignment).
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TABLE 8: Waiting lists and assigned housing in Žďár
municipal coop Family housing years MěstNV assigned coop assigned n.p.ŽĎAS permissions 1967 158 29 217 74 1968 140 38 225 70
1969 211 42 141 80 150 1970 74 36 125 95 1971 125 47 750 0 21 1972 140 96 870 21
1973 164 139 17 1974 17 1975 268 42 22 1976 198 36
1977 note: with more 1978 178 59 61 housing units 1979 1980 227 59 1981 1982 1983 1984 22 1985 36 1986 1987 1988 1989
Source: Author’s own calculations based on archival holdings of the housing committee and the city chronicle
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The non-existence of the records of the planning department, which was responsible for the permission agenda in individual housing construction sector, does not allow us to responsibly assess the “exit” option of self-built family housing. My reading of the chronicle’s periodical minor grievances in this regard is that the limited number of permits granted fulfilled the requests of a small subgroup of those requiring family housing. Even the fragmented information allows us to puzzle out some meaning of the rejections, which were often justified by “a shortage of housing.”
Political interests and public interests The presence of political interests in the decision-making of the housing commission was in a way inevitable, since the legal and political frame prescribed the politicization of its allocation and the supervisory role of the commission. Even if the commission was “emancipated” from the political understanding of public interest, which occasionally happened, it was still read as a political gesture. In other words, defying political intervention could be understood as at least as political act as following the rules of the game. However, the actual configuration of the political interests, direct political interventions and negotiation of the results within the housing commission deserves detailed attention.
For Žďár, there was a set of local goals within the welfare domain that persistently determined the housing allocation: urban renewal [asanace] and expansion of services. Urban renewal became practical to enforce, but it became especially to signify a symbolic departure from the poor and provincial past of Žďár (Beseda 2010; Lozoviuk 2004). The consequence of its sanitation policy led to a constant portion of agenda being “mere” fulfillment of the law by preferential assignment of the “substitute apartments” for those evicted in public interest. The affinity among cases of applicants and political cases of state interest in the commission reports and meeting minutes indicates that the housing commission understood both these categories of applications as an analogical type of assignment “from above” with relatively little space for maneuver. Still, in the cases where the state interest in nomenclature catering was negotiated, there are no signs of negotiation on the matter of urban renewal and its implications in housing. The expansion of these services and their stabilization is reflected in preferential treatment of applicants from this sector, such as lowering the common waiting list requirements for the RaJ [Restaurants and Canteens] (state organization running a statewide chain of eating places) employees in 1974.
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The housing commission and normalization The normalization period could be detected by a change in the style of the written reports. In the language of these official documents, an increased significance of party membership occurred with an overhaul of the commission following municipal elections in 1971. Members of the commission began to be frequently addressed “comrades” unlike in the 1960s. The head of the commission Antonín Brychta was replaced by Marie Pelikánová, who passed the screening process and became, unlike Brychta, a deputy again in 1971. The personal shakeup of the commission in 1971 led to discontinuity, since only Pelikánová and one activist recommended by social organization retained their membership from the previous period.
A new type of political regime presents itself with direct interventions into the working of the housing committee, like a direct order from the city national committee to follow commands of the CCCP, for instance, an order from 1974 to execute an inspection into the family housing to check the number of actual apartments in the newly built individual housing.
The record of prioritization of the nomenclature in the normalization period is rather mixed. On the one hand, the inflow of this type of applicants peaked in 1960s with an expansion of the staff in county national committee and county headquarters of the CP, but remained significant into the 1970s. On the other hand, following the expansion of the preferred groups defined by the government (see chapter “How to get an apartment”), this group began to include lower functionaries and other members of nomenclature, such as prosecutors and leaders of social organization (“indispensable head of the county youth organization”). However, it seems that the housing commission followed relatively narrow definition of these entitlements. In 1974, it did not succumb to the pressure from the county headquarters of the CP to enlist a prominent local journalist in the assignee list. It rejected this “soft command” with a recommendation resembling the one in other cases- employer should take care.
The meaning of “training” in housing policy was ambiguous, following unsatisfactory findings by a supervisory report (“Zpráva o dohlídce hospodaření s byty”) conducted by planning department of the county national committee in 1977. The quoted administrative problems are not specified, so we can only guess their meaning by the program of the training, which included a legal lesson with a stress on assigning substitute housing, dealing with oversized apartments, and defining urgency. We 150 can find one or two potential reasons for this pressure. Despite its listing in some of the earlier yearly plans of work up to 1972, the agenda of the oversized apartments never surfaced in the actual proceedings of the commission. Secondly, the style of minutes and reports changed from 1973 on. Between 1966 and 1973, every single decision of the housing commission was supplied with a short argument, which are listed and treated below. From 1973, the housing commission did present its arguments, and so nearly no grounds for a decision were officially given in the minutes or reports to the council of the city national committee. Regardless of how the commission combined the rectification of administrative misconduct and the pressure to discipline, in order to keep the practice in line with the political and social goals set from above, the practice changed rapidly. From the supervisory report on, the tight monitoring of the commission by the city national committee resulted in a set of detailed quarterly reports on its activities by its head, deputy Pelikánová, and very detailed plan of work for 1978.
Housing needs: an implicit definition Yearly, the politically preferred group consisted of 2 to 5 applicants, so the majority of the housing stock was distributed in a “regular” procedure. Let me present the main characteristics of the allocation process for the non-privileged group. The procedure had two stages: the first was the decision about placement on the waiting list, while the second was an assignee list, assembled according to the topical availability of municipal housing. Due to the nature of the first filter before the waiting list, the numbers of applicants who made it onto the list provides very limited information about the demand. The commission explicitly tried to limit the set of people on the list according to the expected availability, and the pressure to do so in even more restricted way also came numerously in the form of advice from regional national council. As we can see from the table 8, these expectations were, apart from the year 1974, high above the actual “output” (a result of construction, but also of vacated apartments). It is also important to stress out that many factors that shape this group were in play for citizens even before considering such an application. The general knowledge of the principles and rules of allocation probably prevented an unknown number of people from applying. This factor blurs the meaning not only of the waiting lists, but also the “representativeness” of applicants.
Among the eligible arguments for the waiting list were, first, issues concerning urban renewal, followed by reasons associated with the family situation supplemented by the current housing situation: “insufficiency”, “hygienic issues or floor space”, “marriage”, “divorce”, and 151
“overcrowding”. Another set was associated with employment were a considerable or difficult commute, and a job offer from Žďár. Some implicit rules for pre-selection are obvious. The policy of the housing commission excluded any immigration of non-privileged groups, and this principle was even specifically pronounced when Roma families, non-residents at that time, applied. This kind of preference for current residents is also used in the only concrete mention about content of the supervisory role performed in the cooperative sector in 1973. The employment-related arguments were also, for the same reason, excluded, with the reference to the responsibility of the employer. Finally, their insufficiencies were checked, as well as their financial situation. If the savings were considered low and the over-crowdedness, than the eligibility (and urgency), the approximate being one adult person plus one child per one room of the apartment. A boosting factor was to mention conflicts within a family. Divorce was a factor with similar effects as marriage, though the differences are inconclusive. Existing residents of state housing received some priority over occupants of family housing (for instance, a family living with their parents in a family house), probably because it was easier to check the eligibility.
The second filter used to single out the group for assignee list combined the urgency set by the first check with the length of presence on the waiting list. The assignee list included numbered positions and the final assignment decision was up to the council of the city national committee, the proceedings of which are not available. It is still possible to deduce the results from the postponed assignments. These were numerous and it shows again the failure in even biannual planning capacities of the rigid system. The sole incidence of postponement of assignees coming from the privileged group could mean that the numbered list produced by the housing commission was not altered in the council. It also means that the priority of this preferred group was not absolute.
Corruption and non-action Finally, let me return to the catalogue of functions and look at those that are either lacking or were not practiced. There are no records whatsoever of buying the state owned apartment by private person. Due to the generally low utilization of this legal option, it is probable that in Žďár, no such transaction occurred between 1966 and 1978. As we have already touched upon the issue of rampant corruption and black market, it is naïve to expect even some indices of such illegal conduct in official documents. The only two possible, though very weak, signs are irregularity in the list of assignees and one single question about political coverage of another applicant. The addition of an applicant to a waiting list written in ink in 1976 is an unexplained irregularity, given the fact that this addition does not seem to be authorized by the committee. In the second case from 1978, the
152 commission reacted unusually to an applicant that claimed his right to be prioritized due to his employment at the city national committee. The result was a request to bring a recommendation written by the city national committee. Since we do not have additional information, neither from other sources nor from the ensuing session (the next session by the commission is missing), there is not much basis for a meaningful hypothesis. However, even the process of examining the archival collection for signs of corruption reveals that such traces might be extremely difficult to find even in an environment one can reasonably expect corruption (as we have seen chapter “Types and forms of housing”).
During the investigated period, the housing committee never dealt with a case of an oversized apartment. Since there is no centralized evidence of the incidence of such measures in 1970s, the stress of the aforementioned “training” to use this tool shows that our previous considerations about its deterrent disciplining function could be applicable at least to normalization in Žďár.
In a city where most of the housing stock is managed (and also constructed) by a dominant corporation or cooperatives, one should not neglect the supervisory role of the housing commission. Where the extent of municipal housing construction motivated relatively sharp calls for increase from the housing commission to the city national committee, the normalization commission there remained resigned and reserved itself to use the deficient municipal housing stock to justify the rejections of applications on the waiting lists. The predominance of both the cooperative and corporate housing sector is reflected in periodical grumbling of the housing commission, which cited “insufficient coordination”. The supervision of the housing stock and the distribution of housing was probably a mere formality, with the only exception mentioned already above: an opposition to immigration.
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Discussion The “paragon socialist city” Žďár is a place that definitely was not an ideal type of harmonious urban development and straightforward ascension toward socialism. Does this fact disqualify its choice as a proxy or projection screen of real-existing socialism? One should not confuse models, ideal types and ideas and their actual embodiment, as we are reminded in social science. The reasons for the selection of a specific locality were discussed above using historical excurse, and the fitness to the initial criteria was found sufficient, though not perfect. Žďár was highly specialized and did not build on the existing traditions, and an overwhelming majority of its housing stock was non-private. Its population was volatile and, for the incoming unqualified workers, it offered relative social mobility. The loyalty of the population turned to fit the criteria less perfectly, since a considerable part of public, including many members of the CP, was not ready to follow the CP on its normalization path promptly. The initial resistance to normalization was surmounted, but as the regime change in 1989 shows, not entirely. Despite all that, the normalization regime chose Žďár as its model city by itself, as demonstrated by the official awards, increased attention and high level of mobilization enjoyed by the city.
To further the skeptical view, we could question the appropriateness of my focus on state (and municipal) housing stock, especially in the case of Žďár. Does it make sense to analyze distribution of an approximate total of 750 apartments during a limited period? If the housing stock of ŽĎAS and the cooperatives were larger, why should one take just the state housing stock into account? Putting the practical reasons apart, the main argument for the state housing stock is the same as in the choice of Žďár. I have shown that both the corporate and the cooperative housing stock was planned to successively converge with the state one. The fact that this did not happen does theoretically invalidate the choice. Remaining skeptical, one can object that this contradicts the sectorization strategy I have discovered in housing policy. Though an insight into the other sectors of housing policy would increase the insights, I believe that since the state housing was at the easiest disposal of the state party, the principles of social control would be at their most influential. The distance between the intents of the center and the local housing policy is the shortest in state housing. To summarize, I was not expecting completely ideal results in this local study, but rather looking for an approximation of several ideal conditions.
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These questions bring us back to my initial discussion on the manifest and latent functions of social control. Since my theoretical framework utilizes the manifest function and differs in this respect from the tradition of radical critique of social policy, I should discuss the results using the categories of social control that were set as a tool to specify the generalized functionalist view. The discussion on the center, its intentions and on the relevance of our findings in this local study comes in the conclusion, but an interim assessment is presented here.
The social control concept in Higgins’s interpretation includes number of meanings and my theoretical approach stated that all the meanings should be applied in an empirical test. Žďár’s housing policy and especially its allocation procedures turned out to include most of them. The social control in the sense of integration is especially traceable in Žďár. Given the stress on Akce ‘Z’ and on urban renewal in particular, the city offered its version of socialist life to its population. The level to which this worked depends highly on the position in “allochthonous” vs. “autochthonous” cleavage, as Beseda shows. The redevelopment of the older parts and the participation in self- building activities faced some resistance, but for the incoming citizens, these two processes became part of their local identity. While for some the transformation of the identity of the city might not be welcomed by all, for those who opposed it, it turned into a tool of conformation. We have already stated, that the voluntary character of Akce ‘Z’ relied not only on informal social control for conformity, which was a commonplace practice of normalization (to be seen as a participating member of society), but also on conditioning of services. This conditioning seems to fit the conception of social control as exploitation. An even more important embodiment of the social control as conformity or exploitation will be discussed in the case of corporate housing, but I can generally assume that the conditioning of the corporate housing by contract applied to ŽĎAS as well.
The housing committee activities also indicate features of different types of social control. The preferential treatment of nomenklatura was assigned by law and it is a prime example of social control as co-optation. We shall see that, on the national level, there are empirical indices of its relative success in housing. The reservation against sedulous extensive interpretation of the legal entitlements and of the privileged group does not mean that the system was not working or that the commission was showing some signs of resistance. Tendencies to misuse the power, especially at the middle level, were frequent. Cautiousness was thus an understandable strategy to avoid troubles.
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In case of repression, the story is more complicated. Though housing policy of normalization did not generally become a domain for repressive practices (that was reserved for other arenas), still, so far we have identified its particular repressive element: “oversized” apartments and their seizure. The fact that Žďár’s housing commission did not use repression was discussed earlier. However, its existence as a possible threat, especially in combination with experience of its application in 1950s, could work—but probably not in Žďár! The reason is obvious: the size of apartments in the housing stock built after the WWII was standardized, limited and, in Žďár, rather small. Since the population of Žďár was relatively young in the 1950s (mostly incoming workers with their families), the commission probably did not have much experience with the seizure of oversized apartments. That is why the “training” of the housing commission was probably just an empty exercise in this regard.
The case of social control as paternalism might not be visible in the working of the housing commission, but I have extrapolated its implicit definition of housing needs. This definition takes the number of children and a change of marital status, be it divorce or marriage, as a sign of social urgency. It also included number of negative indicators, such as the existence of savings. Given this procedure, the state housing as a social benefit was means tested and did not depart from the usual definition of social policy. However, there were differences; the benefit was tested just once, as it was assigned, and it also formed an asset on the black market, not to speak about its partial subordination to the first track, the privileged group.
This discussion offered an analytical utilization of the theory of social control, which should have given us a better understanding of the reported activities within the housing sector, part of the social welfare domain in the city of Žďár nad Sázavou. A methodological question that deserves our further attention is the ways in which it is possible to work further with these results of Žďár, a single, local case study on the more general level. The answer to “what housing in Žďár offers to our understanding of real existing socialism” will be dealt with in the concluding chapter.
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Housing policy in the public sphere: Public opinion, media and propaganda
This section deals with the media message, propaganda and opinions of the public regarding housing. The main questions I analyzed address the prioritization of housing policy in the public sphere, sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in housing policy, and the way these issues were treated by media and other elements of the propaganda machine of the party-state.
The first section deals with the conception of public space and public opinion. It is followed by a discussion on the quality of different sources used to analyze both the bottom-up and top-down interactions. As the quality of the data as well as sampling methods and analytical tools are explained, the results of the analysis are presented. The analytical section treats findings of surveys and subsequently the media messages concerning housing policy. The results are briefly discussed in the final section of this chapter.
Public opinion, opinions of the public and public space “Explicit opinions … could only exist in legitimate form when articulated individually, restricted to local issues and on occasions defined by the party.” Thomas Lindenberger on public opinion in the GDR (2009, 217)
The idea of public opinion is unthinkable without a space for its formation, whether the agora in case of Greek political society, famous coffee houses in the 19th century, or in the formulation of Jürgen Habermas’ public sphere. Since authoritarian regimes do not allow the public sphere to be realized, these closed societies could not rely on public opinion, because they only "periodically manufacture the public sphere" (Habermas 1991, 218–219). Without much further details in here, it should be stated that the ordinary understanding of public opinion, regardless the conventionally recognized problematic nature of this concept (cf. Peters 1995), is not applicable to real-existing socialism, or should be applied with great caution, because of the deficiencies in the process of the formation of the public opinion. The main obstacles are the monopoly on channels of information by
157 the party-state68 and the inexistence of the public sphere. Therefore, the sources that are used here to reconstruct the opinions and stances among different groups of society are called popular opinion here, following the definition of Thomas Lindeberger (2009, 217–218).
This particular point helps us evaluate two different but closely connected puzzles. First, it is the profound question of the reactions (and potential reactions) of the public to the policy measures. In this sense, an analysis of these public moods is an important part of the answer to the function or role that the policy played socially. Second, it is important to take the deficiency in the formation of political stance in the normalization period seriously, but also, to contextualize it. As Johnston reveals, there certainly are some semi-public platforms which he calls “free spaces” (2012; 2006). Since these free spaces are essential for relatively free discussion and for the possible formation of opposition or dissent, it would be mistaken to try to measure “the production” from these spaces on the same scale as ritualized, or what Lindenberger calls staged consensus (Lindenberger 2009, 210). Even if the number of people involved in these free spaces is limited—or in case of Czechoslovakia and even the dissenting movement, very limited—it is important to keep the difference among these different forms of dissenting actions and the expressions of content. It is not inevitably a matter of moral judgment, since even the subject of these actions understood the significance of his behavior in an entirely different way.
The interplay of the impact of housing policy, official propaganda and popular opinion is an under- researched area not just in the case of Czechoslovakia, but even for the otherwise developed research program on the GDR (Sabrow 2009). I shall discuss some of the implications in the final section, but lacking a tested model of these channels leaves us with only provisional answers.
68 Exposure to foreign media is an example of the imperfection of the monopoly on information channels, but generally, all the mass media were directly or indirectly owned by the party-state, while the control over the content also was not perfect. 158
Surveys The collection of surveys of opinions of the public consists of two sources- official survey conducted in Czechoslovakia by the Institute for the Research of Public Opinion [Ústav pro výzkum veřejného mínění] (henceforth UVVM)69 and surveys conducted by the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (henceforth RFE/RL) abroad. The validity and reliability is extremely diverse, so to critically examine the results and to put them into the right context, some preliminary notes on the nature of these sources is given.
The UVVM became part of the CCCP in 1970–1971. As an integral part of the state party hierarchy, the results, or more precisely the final research reports, were submitted directly to the PSS of the CP. Small fraction of results was made public, but the mechanism of the ideological filter in the CCCP remains unknown, largely due to inaccessible archival sources. Today, most of the surveys are available thanks to the Czech Social Science Data Archive.
One must exercise extreme cautiousness is needed regarding the validity and reliability of the results. The theoretical reasons given above are only one sort of problem. The pitfalls entail the procedure of questioning as well as compilation of the final repost. The 1973 reports frequently include a restrained recipe on how to read the report (ÚVVM and Vrchota 1973, 12), and sometimes even some ideologically motivated prescriptions on how to understand the situation (ÚVVM and Boška 1982).
Surveys relevant to our topic were conducted in 1973, 1977 and 1982. The research reports mostly, perhaps surprisingly, reflect the problem of reliability themselves. Their sections on the methodology and techniques used deal with the topics of sincerity and response rate. Vacek reports frequent “mistrust in keeping the respondents anonymous and worries about sanctions” (ÚVVM and Vacek 1973, 4). Vrchota even adjusts the scale of responses due to “unwillingness to present critical opinion in a dialogue with stranger” (ÚVVM and Vrchota 1973, 5).
69 The UVVM changed its name to Division for the Research of Public Opinion in 1972 and was transferred from the Academy of Sciences to Federal Statistical Burreau. However, the final reports I am using in this thesis are not consistent in presenting their institutional affiliation (some state UVVM even after its theoretical rename, while others keep with the KVVM). I therefore use single, though simplified reference to the institution as UVVM. 159
The relatively close attention paid to the housing sector by the researchers at the UVVM, and thus by their commanding center, the CCCP, is revealing in itself. If the threat of the Czechoslovak citizens to Western media, itself a prominent topic of propaganda and concerns of the CCCP, became a focus of approximately the same number of studies (about 5% of all the surveys conducted by the UVVM) (“Nesstar WebView“ 2012), it ranks housing policy among its top priorities.
The activities of the broadcaster have twofold significance. First, it has been an important source of information both for the West, especially for the public in the US. The evaluation of social policy, and especially its housing part, is therefore an important factor in forming the West’s view of Czechoslovakia. Second, the RFE has definitely not (only) been a one-way propaganda tool. Its responsiveness is especially manifest in two different aspects of its workings: the methodological and technical problems that accompanied the surveying efforts of the RFE/RL.
Mass media The mass media system of Czechoslovakia is broadly described as the Soviet model, where all types of media are either directly or indirectly controlled by the party-state (Jirák and Köpplová 2008, 9). The degree of concentration of the media sector was significant. The most important publisher called Rudé právo (The Red Right or The Red Law) published approximately half of the total circulation of the national dailies and most of the regional press in the 1970s and 1980s. The fact that Rudé právo, as the official “organ” of the CCCP, had by far the largest readership and highest impact in the Czech part of Czechoslovakia70 was not a specific feature, but rather a rule among the Soviet satellites (Gulyás 2001, 77). The control of the CP was reinstituted after the more liberal period of the second half of 1960s and became cemented by a new system of ex-post censorship (Williams 1997, 253; Eidlin 1988).
The housing policy and housing sector in general received a lot of attention in all types of mass media during the normalization period. The selection of sources and sampling of data proceeded in stages. In order to comprehend the coverage of housing issues in mass media in the period of 1968 to 1989, I researched the collections of RFE/RL in the holdings of Open Society Archive. Due to the fact that one of the tasks of both Czechoslovak Unit at the RFE/RL and the East European Research
70 Vacek’s survey (1973) states, that the readership of Rudé Právo daily amounted to 3,5 million Czechs, while its Slovak counterpart Pravda reached about 1,8 million readers in Slovakia. 160 and Analysis Department of the same institution kept clipping service on different topics including housing, I have sampled the mass media texts by years. The logic of sampling followed theoretical foundation of this thesis. My primary interest was the advent of normalization. For the sake of diachronic comparative material, I have also chosen material of the liberalization period from 1966 to the start of normalization. For the period after 1971, I have gathered material on a quadrennial basis.
The reliability of the clipping service was checked against a number of samples from the most important daily Rudé Právo in the Digitalized Archive of Periodicals at the Institute of Czech Literature at the Czech Academy of Sciences (http://archiv.ucl.cas.cz/index.php?path=RudePravo). The results of this critical examination have proven a high level of reliability, in particular compared to the evident bias of the RFE/RL research in this area from the 1950s.
I have also surveyed accessible phone calls and letters to the Czechoslovak desk of the RFE/RL by topics. The results of the analysis of these feedback texts showed that social issues were present in less than 3% of the total of 701 pieces of text. At the forefront of the issues examined in this small sample of data was by and large the supply of consumer goods and uneven access to them, followed by housing problems and health care. However, the limited number of occurrence of these issues could not have assured the significance of these findings. Other possible venues for further research are letters to domestic mass media such as the Czechoslovak Radio [Československý rozhlas].
Analysis
Salience of the housing issues for the public The selection of the housing policy as a proxy for social policy and my hypothesis about importance of social policy as a cornerstone of real-existing socialism imply that the importance of the issue was high. I have already shown in that it was perceived as such by both the propaganda and the party- state. However, the problem of its salience in the public space has not been analyzed yet.
The demand for information was carefully analyzed, as Vacek’s secret survey commissioned by the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the CCCP shows. The housing policy was on the front
161 burner, shortly after the “consumer interests” (ÚVVM and Vacek 1973, 16). Though the interest in housing sector is marked, it is not demonstrated in conversations with friends and fellow workers. It is thus self-evident that housing policy became a matter of individual concern (but not a private one), and it is evident that this relation between the state and an individual was an ideal breeding ground for pacification strategy. The survey of the RFE/RL show more or less the same results: “adequate housing” closely followed the interest in “more consumer goods” among the issues perceived as the most pressing, well above concerns about the judicial system, education or health care (RFE/RL 1972, 3). It is worth mentioning that the item of “citizen’s constitutional rights” fared even “better” than the supply of consumer goods (RFE/RL 1972, 3–4).
Satisfaction of needs as perceived by the public
The data gathered in this survey confirm that the extent of the demands on the level of the housing sector is significant. This poses a problem for the commanding center to such an extent that these demands are consistent with the capacity of Czechoslovak economy (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 69).
The salience of the housing issue is definitely a result of number of factors including the stress put on the “solution to the housing problem”, i.e. housing construction, by the propaganda machine. However, its public presence does not say anything about views on different aspects of the satisfaction of needs. There is also difference among measured variables. Though personal satisfaction with one’s own housing situation is an important factor, which probably co-determines the stance towards housing policy, these variables are definitely not identical. The perception of general efforts of the government by interviewees of the RFE/RL (RFE/RL 1972) from the early phase of real-existing socialism could be interpreted in number of ways.
On the one hand, only about one third of respondents that indicated adequate housing as one of the most important issues evaluated the efforts of the government as higher than “minimal.” On the other hand, these respondents already felt the issue as important, who might also indicated their dissatisfaction with their own situation. Moreover, though just one third of these respondents saw governmental efforts as inadequate, only medical care fared better in this respect. Lastly, the date on which the material was published (January 1972) indicate that it captures the initial conditions of
162 the normalization phase. The role of housing policy in the real-existing socialism could thus not be evaluated, since the efforts of the party-state in the housing sector were only at their beginning.
More nuanced picture is offered by Boška (ÚVVM and Boška 1982), who in his survey from 1981 utilizes a time series, comparing the results of 1973 and 1977 data with his own results from 1981. Though the general trend of decrease in satisfaction is evident from the fact that the ratio of satisfied respondents was decreasing, the rate of the satisfaction, i.e. the respondents indicating they are either entirely or rather satisfied, decreases sharply (72% in 1973, 62% in 1977 and 58% in 1981) (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 14), it is still high. Boška’s own interpretation focuses on the sharp increase in “entirely satisfied” in the respective section (1982, 14–15), but he later acknowledges the rising demand on standards of living, as we have cited above (1982, 68–69). According to this survey, the main determinants of satisfaction with housing are the quality of current dwelling, captured in the formal administrative category of quality. Vrchota even asserted that the category in 1973 accounted for about 50% of the variance of satisfaction (1973, 62). However, “entire satisfaction” was expressed in 1981 by less than half of the respondents occupying apartments of the highest category (Istcategory apartments) (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 15). That might mean either other factors, not identified by Boška, are missing, or the administrative categorization did not capture the quality well.
If we look at the satisfaction from a different angle, the aforementioned decrease in satisfaction becomes relatively weaker. The trends in willingness to improve individual housing situation increases generally, but not too sharply and so does the ratio of people definitely not willing to change (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 25–28).
Allocation Practices: Distribution and its Equity
The overview of the impacts of distribution practices corresponds to our earlier findings. Though the state or municipal housing stock should have been based on social needs, its actual effect accentuates the merits of individuals in the system. Up to one third of the state-owned apartments were acquired through inheritance or some sort of transfer from family members. The ratio of people occupying these state-owned apartments is about five times higher than the rest of the entire population (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 55; cf. Matějů 1986), which means that the elite benefited from the system of allocation significantly more than the average population. Though we lack results accounting for the effects of real-existing socialism on the state housing sector concerning family structure, Vrchota showed that by the advent of normalization, state housing also
163 differed from other forms by the smaller average size of families living there. Though I have shown the theoretical stress on large families through their preferences, the actual effect of this priority might be negligible in reality. The fact of creation or cementation of inequalities based on the degree of loyalty to the regime is even more markedly illustrated by opinions on the distributional practices.
The singularity of stress placed on the subjective aspect of popular views on equity in housing distribution in Boška’s survey is striking (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 45, 50, 69), especially given the fact that the subjective nature of these popular views is substantiated by reference to their embededness in individual experience. However, given the ideological elements present in the final report and the results of this particular issue, this demeaning strategy becomes understandable.
The data reveal an utterly critical general picture of popular acceptance of the actual allocation practices. The least trusted mechanism was the distribution by cooperatives (16%) followed by corporations (18%) and National Committees (22%) (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 48). The relationship between the distribution channel the respondent got his or her apartment and the assessment of the allocation practice is significant. In corporate housing sector as well as in the case of municipal housing stock, the “clients” are more critical towards the equity of the same process in general. Participants in the cooperative housing sector respond in quite the reverse way. The members of the communist party reportedly responded in much more positive manner, although no actual figures were given.
The main reason given for the negative assessment of the distribution was corruption and clientelism (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 52). The resulting recommendation is a clear example of understanding of the role of policy and propaganda, as we have noted earlier. Boška calls for “measures that would increase the awareness of the people on the objective nature in the assigning of apartments,” (ÚVVM and Boška 1982, 52). The connection between the propaganda machine, which should heal the society from misapprehension based on misleading personal experience, and misused research methods could hardly find a more conspicuous expression. This union found a number of applications in mass media as we shall see, but also in other channels of propaganda, such as manuals for agitation and propaganda. For instance, the aforementioned brochure Fakta a Argumenty on Housing policy states that “in one survey conducted by the UVVM, […] housing policy is at the forefront of the positive rating of different aspects of living standards, before financial
164 income, social security, food, clothing, medical service and cultural activities” (ÚV KSČ 1986, 5). I have not been able to identify this particular survey, since no actual reference other than “one survey by UVVM” is given. Due to the lack of effective peer review and the secrecy of sociological surveys, the results (themselves of problematic reliability) still could have been manipulated for the purpose of public presentation to answer Boška’s call above to “remedy” public awareness.
Analysis of mass media The first impression of the way housing policy was treated in mass media in Czechoslovakia is mixed. On the one hand, the critical texts about problems associated with housing are present, but they mostly deal with problems of the daily life. On the other hand, the persuasive element in the communication never disappears and it is generally supported by moral arguments and references to the generally just and effective system. Let me therefore present the results of thematic analysis of a representative set of 70 texts that appeared in the official media.
The topic of housing problem was present even before the advent of normalization and its importance for the party-state is evident on high number of articles, especially in Rudé Právo, written by CP officials. The framing of the issue usually included references to economic system and housing shortage (Kasalický 1966) and housing was already framed as an integral, utterly important part of living standards (Stenbrecherová 1966). The reference frame included Western countries and the focus was mainly on high demand, unfulfilled supply (Cichoň 1970; Hodanová 1968; Švehla 1968). Though scepticism about the capacity of the system to respond to the demand in a conclusive way was present in most of the texts, hope in prioritization of the issue of housing construction belittled these concerns.
However, as the capacity of the system became a public issue, some of the symbolic centers of the debate even in the period of normalization reflected it. The most important topic associated with capacity to fulfill the ambitious construction programme were contracts with companies from abroad, i.e. self-sufficiency. The incapability of the Czechoslovak industry to deal with the housing problem became naturally an object of close attention of the RFE/RL, but also Western press (cf Bourne 1970). Number of deals with corporations from the USSR, Yougoslavia, but also from Denmark were a sign of demise on domestic sources (Western press and RFE/RL), but domestically,
165 it was framed as an assurance to the departure from 1960s with its series of broken promises in the housing sector.
There were more goals in the persuasive communication of the party-state by the advent of normalization. The federal prime minister Lubomír Štrougal was publicly lowering expectations about short-term solution to the housing problem (CSTV 1970). At the same time, negative perception of housing problem was periodically undermined by references to overall improvement in quality and manipulative references to the interwar period (Žďárský 1971). Another pronounced aspect, present in most of the media campaigns in Czechoslovakia, was reference to deficits in utilization of existing options. Poor administration of cooperative housing was a safe ground, since it was portrayed as too autonomous (Štěpánková 1972) and thus substantiate increased control over this sub-sector by the state administration (Holátková, Hejduk 1970). The advent of normalization was also marked by a specific mobilization campaign against emigrants from 1968-1970.
The topic of “flats of emigrants” became the most noticeable political campaign associating the normalization period with housing sector. Czechoslovakia experienced a wave of mass emigration of about 100 000 citizens, with disproportionate share of educated social groups (Bren 2008, 837). Since these people vacated their apartments and were, following the law, sentenced for fleeing the Czechoslovakia (Bren 2008, 840). The campaign exploited the housing shortage and consisted of number of calls for resolute and fast solution that would enrich the housing stock with these vacated and confiscated property (Štěpánková 1970, cf.; Koinor, Kubala 1970; Fišl 1971). This call for a legislation, which would make the “flats of emigrants” swiftly “at disposal”, i.e. confiscated and transferred, came shortly (Předsednictvo FS ČSSR 2013). Though the actual practical effect of signs of scapegoating and “utilization” parallel to the expulsion of Germans, the scope was negligible compared to the post-1945 ownership “transfers” in the housing sector.
When František Konior of the National Committee in Brno spoke about “valuable contribution to consolidation” (1970), he meant the increased housing capacity caused by vacation of the apartments of emigrants. However, there was a secondary value, probably more important in effect- the mobilization campaign against those who left the country - and left “us” with normalization, as the officially supported sentiment went (Bren 2008, 839–841). This mobilization campaign was unique in its scope, but there were other mobilizing topics exploiting similar sentiment, mainly egalitarianism, such as renewal of the campaign on oversized apartments (štk 1972). However, as I
166 have noted in analysis of actual practices in Žďár, the extent to which this practice was actually implemented on the ground remains in question.
Before I will shortly discuss the type, function and content of criticism of housing policy in media, let me deal with the positive content of the persuasive communication in the field of housing policy. There were two chief aspects of the housing policy that were used for to praise the practice of real- existing socialism in housing policy. As in the consumer policy, the frozen rents were presented as a matter of prudent management offering life certainties in contrast to both the pre-1970 chaos and the capitalist West (Cichoň 1970; Hejkal 1982). The second story promoted by the regime was the quantitative leap in housing construction throughout 1970s. A symptomatic feature of the period after the first five-year-plan in particular was the strength of references to the quantity of accomplishment in housing construction. An article calling the surpassing of the plan “spoilt pleasure” of the opponents of the regime (Drobný 1976) was motivated not only by addressing the opponents, but by accentuating the vicious circle of broken promises in housing policy from 1960s.
I have mentioned earlier that the critical comments were receiving attention in mass media. Careful analysis of the content and framing of these texts uncover the fact that there are number of techniques to ensure that the association between solution and systemic change does not exist (and therefore profound change is not needed. This sort of criticism coined in the Czech public discourse as communal critique (Kosík, Šnebergová, and Zumr 2004, 20) shared mostly these features:
a) They were based on personal experience and they stressed out the fact that any generalization could be misleading.
b) They included references to one-sidedness and did not use much aggregate data.
c) They were sometimes seemingly sharp in their criticism, yet they used number of “morally- driven” arguments that were employed as a reference to the deviating character of the case or practice described.
The most visible topics included corruption and black market with flats (CSTV 1972; Smola 1988; Unknown 1982; Měško 1972b; Kubic 1972), quality of the newly constructed apartments (Vltavský 1976; Šrámek 1976; ma 1976), and services including repairs (Trhlík 1982; Unknown 1976; Janák 1988; Unknown 1972). The maintenance probably became the most urgent issue, as the analysis of complaints reveals (Unknown 1972). One of the most interesting features of the mass media 167 coverage of housing sector was the critique of “bourgeois behavior” (“O čem se hovoří (Hvězda)“ 1982), a strategy known in other communist regimes of that period (Dombos and Pelladini 2009).
Discussion As I have noted earlier, since the information needed to properly analyze the role of the propaganda and feedback (both present in surveys and media messages) is missing, the results presented in this chapter are merely of provisional validity. It seems that the effort to lower the expectations in housing policy was overwhelmingly surpassed by expectations raised by the offer of the normalization period to surmount the housing shortage and thus solve the housing problem. Despite these increased expectations that were definitely not lived up to, the level of satisfaction did not decrease dramatically, as I have shown above.
The role of mass media seemed to be strong in channeling grievances, a strategy associated with the communal critique. Despite the fact that part of the message was increasingly critical, this critique did not surpass particular topics and was never aimed at systemic features of housing policy. The generally shared sceptical view on allocation practices did not reach the public sphere in the form of a threat to the regime. Apart from the channeling and softening role of mass media, the aforementioned sectorization added sufficiently effective ingredient to the pacifying strategy, as it created barriers impossible to transgress unless an exit strategy of the black market was used.
Mass media largely remained a tool of propaganda, overflowing with persuasive messages. Social surveys were used just selectively and occasionally in the public sphere, but we can assume that their function as an input for the policy making increased in time. The results of the complaints to the RFE/RL indicate - in spite of their inconclusive character – that the field of systemic feedback remains a fruitful and challenging venue for further research.
168
Conclusion
This research examined whether the activities of the regime within the social welfare domain contribute to the legitimacy of real-existing socialism and, if so, to what extent? This chapter summarizes my findings. The first section discusses the theoretical framework. It returns to the substantiation of a specific approach and employment of uncommon concepts, such as the social welfare domain. It is followed by a review of the main findings and a discussion of their validity. Finally, a structured answer to the research question, rather than a definite answer, is offered.
I have argued that, though there is a wealth of useful inspiration in existing comparative welfare theories to answer this question, these tools are not applicable in a context of a non-capitalist, non- democratic regime. The main argument was the equivalence and adequacy of the core concept of the welfare system or welfare state. There is a profound difference between the nature of distributive and redistributive processes in the liberal-democratic capitalist system on the one hand, and in the communist system with centrally planned state economy on the other. Whereas the redistribution in welfare systems aims at the intentional modification of the results of market distribution, in communist systems, social policy and concepts do not offer those studying its effects the analytic leverage to understand these concepts separately, since the “redistribution of redistribution” does not make much sense. However, that is only an indicator of a conceptual problem, not its substance.
Even more troubles reside in the underlying, sometimes implicit, values of the concept of welfare state. Reiger and Liebfried have convincingly shown that, in the case of East Asia, the welfare state concept is “biased” (2003). The construct bias lies in its links with modernization theory. Despite its specific manifestations, modernization theory conceives of the development of social policy as a linear process. When East Asia (or our example of real-existing socialism) reaches its scope, it incorporates it into its linear picture and asserts that it is going to evolve into a Euro-Atlantic model. This corresponds with Esping-Andersen’s understanding of social policy in Japan: it is “uncrystallized” and “unformed” as of yet (1997, 187). If the Euro-Atlantic model is based on a conception of an individualist conception of political and social rights, the East Asian countries/cultures are definitely not individualist. The warning against the construct bias becomes apparent once we take into account the results of my analysis of the “citizen as employee”, the ownership rights transformation, and the party-state political environment.. For this reason, I believe that the concept of social
169 welfare domain and the theoretical tour into functionalism, the concepts of social control, and an examination of some classical concepts of welfare theory were not autotelic. It also gives reasons for my departure from the existing mode of discussion of social policy in communist Czechoslovakia represented by (Rákosník 2010; Kalinová 2012; Inglot 2008).
Functional equivalence could be the right theoretical answer to these methodological problems. I have regarded the communist “social policy” as profoundly different to the classical welfare states. The social welfare domain concept is even higher on the level of abstraction than the concept of welfare system. The broad perspective provided by structural functionalism was supplemented by social control, a more tangible concept entailing different types of control in a way suitable for functional analysis. My proposition has been that, through the use of social control and its latent or manifest intent, the party-state acquired quasi-legitimacy. I have tested this proposition using housing policy as a proxy for activities in the social welfare domain. The testing of the proposition operationalized the definition of the social welfare domain and looked at the way and strategies by which housing needs were constructed and catered in normalization Czechoslovakia. For this reason, housing policies where approached from different angles.
Its role within the welfare system was explored both from the empirical point of view, but also by analyzing the perception of housing policy by different actors groups in the normalization Czechoslovak society: by official scholarship and propaganda, by the party-state itself, and by society. The core category of housing policy was identified as allocation of housing, and so different forms and types of housing were identified and described, and specific allocation in the sub-sectors was examined. The privileged position of the municipal or state housing stock in the housing system and within the social welfare domain was treated in more detail. The reasons of the privileged position are practical as well as theoretical. The ideological master plan of state socialism included convergence of all non-state property into the state’s possession, as I have shown in the chapter on ownership rights and their transformation. Real existing socialism refrained from furthering the convergence of types and forms of housing, but the state housing remained the ideological flagship and an arena where the state could operate in the most straightforward way.
Three main findings, that have relevance to theory building, should be discussed here in detail: the sectorization dynamic, contradicting processes of simultaneous appropriation and alienation, and the configuration of social control in housing policy. The pattern of sectorization discovered in the
170 housing policy is not only a spontaneous departure from the original communist plan of convergence of types and forms of housing. I have shown that, though the original structure of the housing arena was set already in 1959 by the Housing Document, the decision to keep and even intensify the relatively separate sub-sectors of housing policy was intentionally made in the advent of normalization. These sectors of family dwellings in individual (state) housing, corporate housing, cooperative housing and housing in private family houses was partially restructured even during the normalization period. The corporate housing transformed into a specific group within cooperative housing, and personal ownership of apartments was introduced. I do not want to underestimate the impact of these changes, and the introduction of the option to purchase apartments legally from the state housing stock especially deserves further attention, but globally, the main dynamic did not comprise restructuring, but rather the reinforcement of individual sectors.
For each of the sectors, different policies were designed, a different configuration of actors developed and different dynamics emerged. Also, the type and extent of social control became diversified. The resulting stratification by housing into “housing classes” might be exaggerated, but within the context of nivelization, it became an important factor. The social control forms were discussed in the chapter on local allocation in Žďár. What remains open for further research is the validity of findings from the case study of Žďár.
In any research, there is always some sort of trade-off between internal and external validity of findings. As Gerring states, “the corresponding virtue of case study research is its internal validity,” (2009, 101), but logically he warns that the external validity (that is, the validity of the findings from single case for a larger, yet unstudied population of cases) is utterly limited. We attempted to tackle this obstacle partially by using a strategy similar to the one employed in case selection on the national level. This method of crucial case is based on the theoretical selection of a case fitting the theory as close as possible (Gerring 2007; George and Bennett 2005, 182). Again, we took Marxism- Leninism at its word and set number of conditions the case needed to fulfill. As we have seen, Žďár complied well, though not perfectly. The external validity was thus enhanced, since we can reasonably assume that by and large (i.e., not in all individual characteristics), it is an extremely favorable case. Still, there are some limits to generalizations. The repressive potential of housing policy was not used in Žďár. However, the explanation may be banal; the low potential of dissent due to a number of factors including more consistent leveling of housing (because of nearly no
171 inherited inequalities) inhibited the need for such measures. In other words, the rest of the instruments of social control were sufficient to create quasi-legitimacy and to maintain “peace for work”. We should also not forget the wealth of information from other spheres where repression has been carried out.
The transformation of the ownership structure was one of the endeavors started in the early phase of the communist regime. The role of normalization was limited here, but it exploited the dynamic that this process created in the housing sector. I have identified two general, rather contradictory consequences of this project: alienation and appropriation. The assessment of these consequences synthesizes the findings of the chapter “The ownership structure of the housing domain”. The appropriation in the form of quasi-ownership enabled sectorization and created incentives for black market transactions, but it also led to a decrease of confidence in the administration and intense law breaking. The legal institution of personal use did not cover all the content of ownership rights. Due to its construction, it did not allow for the very limited use of the fruits of its labor. Subletting was not legally possible except in cases where only part of the property was sublet, and even then, only after the potential sublessor had gone through a complicated administrative process. The right of management was also tightly regulated: inheritance and exchanges were allowed, but other monetized transactions were not. It definitely created some stability, but led to another issue: alienation from housing.
The second source of alienation came from paternalism in services. The state was expected to take care of the management, maintenance and modernization because it was bound by its own legal obligations in these areas. The incompleteness of ownership rights led to the classical economic hold-up problem, a situation that decreases incentives for investment on the part of the quasi- owner, as we discussed earlier. Despite attempts at remedying the problem in 1966 and 1978, the regime was never able to reconcile tenants (quasi-owners) in state housing, corporate housing and, to some extent, cooperative housing with their “quasi-property”. The indications of alienation, such as very low private initiative in maintenance, repairs and modernization, combined with ineffective centrally planned services to address these issues, led to a desperate state of the housing stock. Remedial attempts also pointed to a pragmatic departure from the ideological frame. A more radical step in this direction would destabilize the whole system, which is probably why the conditions of
172 sale were never made more accessible and realistic. The paradox of parallel appropriation and alienation also seems to be the key legacy of the communist regime at least in the housing sector.
So far, the intent behind the manifest functions of housing policy remains unresolved. At the dawn of the communist regime, just weeks before the Velvet Revolution, the official scholars Matějovský of the party-state clearly articulated the aims of social planning in a secret report submitted to the CCCP, stating that “on the central level [social planning] serves as a tool to neutralize potential sources of social strain“ (1989, 34). Not a rights-based but rather a solely satisfaction-based definition of the goals of housing policy appears in all types of documents, from secret to open ones, from the official policy documents to official scholarly texts. It was particularly pronounced with the advent of normalization and its offer of better living standards, and in housing policy, it became a leading guideline in the same period. The association between “the societal peace“ or “peace to work”, and the methods used to achieve these stabilization goals in housing policy are beyond doubt.
Finally, the research question is to be resolved. The results are mixed and defy a straightforward solution. Unlike Rowell, who decidedly sides with de-legitimation in the case of housing policy in the GDR, we preset a set of pros and cons. Part of the delegitimizing factors apply mostly to the 1980s, since economic difficulties stalled the housing construction by that time, but the relevance of these objections is questionable regarding the systematic features of the real-existing socialism. Let me synthesize Musil’s list of shortcomings of the housing policy first and comment on it. It is to date the most complete explanation, though it assesses the system from the perspective of its efficacy.
The responsiveness of both central planning and administrative allocation procedures could work in a time of crises, but it could not resolve a situation when needs and tastes become differentiated. The stress on quality induces more bureaucratization. Frozen rents and different conditions within the housing sector, especially tenures, led to the rise of inequalities. Another type of inequality is caused by the inability of a system of straightforward factors of rents (space in meters) to reflect the qualitative factors (Musil 1992a, 64–67). To this list, we can add the disregard for the legal frame, the black market, the appropriation and alienation of the inhabitants and sectorization.
173
The issue of quality has not been tackled by this thesis, but we can expect even more informal social control in this area, since it was completely left to the judgment of local authorities. However, though the factor of quality, differentiation and capacity to respond to these demands is important, the inaccessibility to the relevant data makes it a black box that cannot be illuminated.
Most of the factors listed here are double-edged. The process of alienation and appropriation led to a miserable state of the housing stock, as well as to high and mostly unfulfilled expectations from the state. It also created inequalities, which in turn produced social strain. However, these uneven circumstances were a precondition to sectorization, a strategy in which the technique of “divide and pacify” could be employed. Smaller social groups with different, sometimes contradicting interest might not increase legitimacy, but they would definitely increase the capacity to govern. The legitimation factors associated with appropriation and alienation are basically two. The first is a truly legitimating factor of a “quasi-stakeholder-society” in a communitarian sense (cf. Etzioni 1998). The alienation from housing (and the living environment in general) adds to detachment from public life, although I acknowledge that other factors that led to demobilization are much more important. The black market is also an ambiguous feature of the system. On the one hand, it creates an exit. This exit is not as radical as resistance or emigration, but it definitely decreases some of the pressure on the system. However, common illegal practices definitely decrease both governability and legitimacy.
174
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Abstract The scholarly oriented discussion about communist regimes and their legacies largely lacks understanding of the role of welfare policies in these systems. It has been widely acknowledged that the last period of communist rule started with attempts at reconfiguration of legitimacy as a source of stability. These efforts included implementation of more generous (and ambitious) welfare policies. I propose to start with a proper conceptualization of welfare policies, which would provide an adequate frame to study systems distinctively different from liberal democratic systems. Dismissing the existing alternatives such as welfare state or welfare system for their cultural bias, I argue for my abstract concept of social welfare domain based on social needs and their catering instead of previously utilized concepts of social risk or social rights.
The research question tackles the legitimation role of activities in the social welfare domain in a system I define as real-existing socialism. Czechoslovak communist regime from 1969 to 1989 presents a suitable crucial case. In Czechoslovakia, the communist regime was arguably the most “successful” as measured by strength of opposition or other forms of discontent. It also fits the Marxist-Leninist theory of development of socialism and communism best with its relatively high level of economic development before the advent of communism.
I narrow the study of real-existing socialism in Czechoslovakia and the function of its activities in the social welfare domain by focusing on the aspect of social control and by choosing housing policy as a proxy for social policy to perform an in-depth analysis. The analysis is based on occasional employment of insights and gathered approaches used in the research the research program of social policy in the German Democratic Republic, since it presents the cutting edge in the field.
I employ state-centered approach, which is appropriate due to the specific character of the party- state polity, though it is currently under strong criticism. Using historical institutionalist perspective and interpretative approach of argumentative analysis based on constructivist paradigm, I examine the policy process in the housing sector from a number of different angles. The data selected for this study come from various domestic and foreign sources and levels of openness, ranging from previously secret archival documents through public opinion surveys conducted by the Radio Free Europe to official scholarship and propaganda texts. In order to ensure validity and reliability of my findings, I have used triangulation methods confronting these different sources, but also using various methods and analysis at the level of the state and at the local level. Various qualitative analytical techniques are applied including archival research, content analysis, thematic analysis or the method of quasi-interview.
The dynamic character of legitimation is reflected in close attention paid to the advent of the real- existing socialism between the years 1969 to 1971. I identify “social certainties” one of the chief elements of the offer of the newly establishing political system. Housing policy is then studied in the historical context of the evolution of social welfare domain in Czech lands. It is followed by analysis by the governing model and legal context with particular attention paid to the newly established conception of ownership rights.
Further probe into the structure of the housing domain reveals a process I call sectorization. I argue that by dividing the housing sector into relatively disparate subsectors of municipal, cooperative, corporate and family housing, the communist regime exploited the strategy of divide and pacify
200 aptly discovered by Vanhuysse for the later period. The evolution of this strategy helps to explain its occurrence in the post-1989 welfare system.
The instrument key to the understanding of the housing sector in my case is the allocation process. Having examined its regulatory framework and its ideological context on the level of party-state and thus rules and intentions, I present an analytical probe into the actual practices of allocation of housing in a particular location. The field study was conducted at Žďár nad Sázavou, since I have identified it as the “paragon socialist city” with the most favorable conditions for implementation of the socialist allocation principles. Despite the fact that the external validity of this probe is limited, I have come to the conclusion that social control was one of the strong functions housing policy. The integrative role, repressive threats, and paternalism were all present in the allocation practices in Žďár nad Sázavou.
I argue that all these functions were fulfilled in a relatively effective way, and thus the housing policy was an important and successful constituent of legitimacy of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia.
This hypothesis finds support not only in my findings from Žďár nad Sázavou, but also in adopting by the regime exponents themselves the housing policy and the social welfare domain in general for a strategically important field.
The notion of “societal peace”, “peace to work” became flagship of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Their guarantees in the sense of nominal social policy and its functional equivalents found its public expression in the phrase “social certainties”, one of the defining features of the regime.
My research opens number of questions that the current research methods and approaches in comparative welfare policy are unable to answer. It has therefore been necessary to construct a new, more abstract conceptual frame and to use it for a detailed and contextualized probe into specific domain. Cross-case validity of my findings is in question, but tools and provisional answers of my study, which has an ambition of a “building-bloc”, can build on my theoretical findings in order to understand communist, and in general non-democratic social welfare domains without cultural bias of the liberal-democratic experience.
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Anotace (česky)
Vědecká diskuse o komunistických režimech a jejich odkazu postrádá porozumění role sociální politiky v těchto systémech. Široce přijímaným faktem je, že poslední období komunistické vlády započalo rekonfigurací zdroje legitimity jako základu jejich stability. Součástí těchto snah bylo zavádění štědřejší a ambicióznější sociální politiky. Domnívám se, že výzkum by měl být postaven především na důkladné konceptualizaci sociální politiky tak, aby mohl poskytnout rámec adekvátní studium systémů zásadně odlišných od liberálně-demokratických systémů. Dosavadní alternativy jako “welfare state” či “welfare system” v této práci odmítám pro jejich kulturní zatížení. Navrhuji proto využití vlastního konceptu „social welfare domain“, který je založen na sociálních potřebách a jejich uspokojování namísto dříve užívaných sociálních rizik či sociálních práv.
Má výzkumná otázka se týká legitimační role aktivit v “social welfare domain” v systému, který definuji jako reálný socialismus. Československý komunistický režim v letech 1969 až 1989 představuje příhodný případ. Komunistický režim v Československu byl zřejmě “nejúspěšnější”, měříme-li tento úspěch silou opozice či jinými formami nesouhlasu. Československo zároveň kvůli stupni svého ekonomického rozvoje před nástupem komunistické vlády nejlépe odpovídá marxisticko-leninské teorii o vývoji k socialismu a komunismu.
Pro účely hlubší analýzy se soustředím na aspekty sociální kontroly v rámci aktivit “social welfare domain” v Československém reálném socialismu. K výzkumu aktivit v “social welfare domain” jsem si pro nutné přiblížení vybral oblast bytové politiky. Analýza se také opírá o postřehy a přístupy z výzkumného programu týkajícího se sociální politiky v Německé demokratické republice, neboť tento program je nejrozvinutější.
Využívám výzkumného paradigmatu založeného na soustředění se na stát (state-centered approach). Přestože je tento přístup předmětem silné kritiky, pro můj specifický případ politického systému se „státostranou“ je vhodný. S pomocí historického institucionalismu a interpretativním přístupem argumentační analýzy založeném na konstruktivistickém paradigmatu zkoumám z různých hledisek proces tvorby politik v bytovém sektoru. Soubor dat využitých v této práci pochází z mnoha různých zdrojů a stupňů otevřenosti, počínaje dříve tajnými archivními materiály přes výzkumy veřejného mínění prováděné Rádie svobodná Evropa až po dobové propagandistické texty. K zajištění validity a reliability výsledků užívám triangulační metodu, kterou tyto zdroje konfrontuji a provádím analýzu na úrovni státu i na lokální úrovni. V rámci výzkumu využívám celou škálu kvalitativních metod včetně archivního výzkumu, obsahové analýzy, tematické analýzy či techniky kvazi-rozhovoru.
Dynamický charakter legitimace nachází odraz v mé pozornosti věnované nástupu reálného socialismu v letech 1969-1971. Ukazuji, že kategorie sociální či životní jistoty tvořila zásadní složku tzv. nabídky nově se rodícího režimu. Předmětem výzkumu je dále bytová politika v historickém kontextu zrození a vývoje sociální politiky v českých zemích. Následuje analýza modelu vládnutí a právního kontextu se zvláštním důrazem na transformativní charakter vlastnických vztahů.
Následující rozbor domény bydlení ukazuje proces, který nazývám „sektorizace“. Komunistický režim připravil rozdělením sektoru bydlení na relativně nesouvislé subsektory komunálního, družstevního,
202 podnikového a soukromého rodinného bydlení půdu pro provádění politiky „divide and pacify“ (rozděl a uklidni), tedy strategii objevenou v sociální politice pozdějšího období Vanhuyssem.
Klíčovým procesem pro porozumění domény bydlení je v mém případě alokační mechanismus. Po prozkoumání jeho regulačního rámce a ideologického kontextu na úrovně státostrany, tedy normativních pravidel a záměrů, představuji analýzu do lokální praxe vlastní distribuce na konkrétním místě. Terénní výzkum byl proveden ve městě Žďár nad Sázavou, neboť jsem ho identifikoval jako „vzorové socialistické město“ s nejpříhodnějšími podmínkami pro zavádění socialistických alokačních principů. Vnější validita této sondy je omezená, avšak přesto prezentuji výsledky ukazující na silnou sociálně-kontrolní funkci bytové, respektive sociální politiky. Integrativní funkce, hrozba represí a paternalismus byly všechny součástí alokačního procesu ve Žďáru nad Sázavou.
Ukazuji, že tyto funkce byly naplňovány relativně efektivně a bytová politika se tak stala důležitým prvkem legitimizace komunistického režimu v Československu.
Tato hypotéza nachází oporu nejen v mých výsledcích ze Žďáru nad Sázavou, ale rovněž ve faktu, že bytová politika se stala stěžejním, strategickým polem komunistického režimu.
Pojmy “sociální smír” a “klid na práci” se staly vlajkovými loděmi komunistického režimu v Československu. Jejich garance ve smyslu sociální politiky a jejích funkčních ekvivalentů našla své veřejné vyjádření v sociálních či životních jistotách, tedy v základním stavebním kamenu režimu.
Tento výzkum otevírá množství otázek, na které nelze se současnými metodami a přístupy odpovídat. Bylo proto nutno vytvořit nový, abstraktnější konceptuální rámec a vyzkoušet jeho možnosti na konkrétním výzkumném materiálu. Externí validita pro další případy je problematická, avšak tato práce deklaruje ambici stát se stavebním kamenem pro tvorbu nové teorie. V tomto smyslu může můj koncept “social welfare domain” obohatit porozumění komunistickým a obecněji demokratickým režimům bez kulturního zatížení liberálně-demokratickými zkušenostmi. V užším slova smyslu mohou mé výsledky sloužit k zatím chybějícímu vysvětlení kapacity pro provádění politiky „divide and pacify“ po roce 1989.
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List of illustrations
p.132 Masaryk ve Žďáru nad Sázavou p.135 Památník Rudoarmějce [Monument of the Red Army Soldier] p137 Bronzové sousoší „Vítězný únor [Bronze statue “Victorious February”] p.137 Žďár nad Sázavou in 1989 p.141 Sídliště ve Žďáře nad Sázavou IV [the housing estate in Žďár nad Sázavou IV]
Pictures on pages 137 and 141 are reprinted from
Filka, Ivo, a Jaroslav Švoma. 2005. Žďár nad Sázavou v zrcadle staletí. Žďár nad Sázavou: Město Žďár nad Sázavou ve spolupráci s Regionálním muzeem ve Žďáře nad Sázavou Houf,
Pictures from pages 135 and 137 are reprinted from
Václav, a Jaroslav Švoma. 1989. Žďársko ve fotografiích. 1. vyd. Žďár nad Sázavou : Brno: ONV ; Blok.
Picture on the page 141 is reprinted from http://www.spszr.cz/zdar/historie.html
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