Military Operations in Romanian Anti-Partisan Warfare, 1944–1958

Romanian anti-communist armed resistance has received relatively little attention outside the country, despite its resemblance to other small, diffused, headless insurgencies being fought in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This article deals with military operations mounted against the partisans, with a special focus on tactics such as cordoning, checkpoints, patrols, sweeps, ambushes, and informed strikes. Based mostly on primary sources, it highlights success and failure against determined and elusive guerrillas.     

The West German 68‐ers encounter the events of 1989

Why did the German left react negatively to the events in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989/90? There are several reasons to be given: the problem the left has in dealing with nationalism, the acceptance on the part of the West German left of the GDR as a legitimate German state; the ambivalent attitude it has towards the United States, and its deeply entrenched ‘state‐fixation’. At the present time, the German left is engaged in soul‐searching discussions which show different lines of development, but its most urgent task is to desist trying to salvage anything of value from the ‘socialism’ practised by the GDR and eastern Europe.     

The evolution of business – state interaction in Russia: From state capture to business capture?

This article discusses two basic strategies of Russian companies—isolation from, and close cooperation with the state. The author analyses several ways in which companies realise these strategies, drawing analogies with the ‘exit’ and ‘voice’ strategies suggested by A. Hirschman. It is shown that under the conditions of a weak state these strategies lead either to an expansion of the shadow economy or to ‘state capture’. Both the privatisation of the state and the lack of its privatisation result in budget crises as well as drastic social and political shocks, leading to calls for a ‘strong hand’ in the business community itself. However, as there is little political competition and the mechanisms of democratic control are weak, state consolidation takes place as a bureaucratic consolidation accompanied by new opportunities for informal ‘business capture’ by the authorities. Nevertheless, the high degree of openness of the economy and the remaining heterogeneity of political actors provide business with a wide range of possible strategies of interaction with the state. This article explores how these strategies are becoming more formal and public compared to the 1990s. Strategies of isolation from the state now take place as legal strategies of internationalisation. Cooperation strategies, on the other hand, currently seem to be more efficient when switching from the traditional lobbying of private interests to more rational and collective actions aimed at providing the necessary conditions for sustainable economic development.     

“Bad enough governance”: state capacity and quality of institutions in post-Soviet autocracies

This article contributes to current discussions on state capacity, quality of institutions, and political regimes. Our analysis demonstrates that the J-curve argument (“good institutions” in autocracies as compared to hybrid and transitional regimes) may not be generic and is not well supported by empirical evidence from the sample of post-Soviet countries. An explanatory model of the “King of the Mountain” is instead provided. Its focus is on the monopoly of political rent as a precondition for extraction of economic rent. It demonstrates an inverse correlation between the quality of institutions and the extraction of political and economic rent, and explains why an autocrat may not have an incentive to improve institutions that may make his/her monopoly vulnerable, and rather would prefer to preserve a low quality of institutions and “bad enough governance.” An analysis of a variety of external and domestic factors that may endanger this monopoly is provided. Finally, the autocrat's alternative strategic choices are analyzed. It is argued that better payoffs for the autocrat – paradoxically – may result from partial reforms and improvement of the quality of institutions. However, for various reasons, this is not occurring in post-Soviet autocracies.