The changing character of criminality and policing in post-socialist Lithuania: From fighting organized crime to policing marginal populations?

This paper argues that the character ofcriminality in post-socialist Lithuania isundergoing a significant change. Up untilthe mid 1990s criminality was defined bythe conflict between the state and criminalgroups who challenged the state's authorityin the re-distribution of state property.Criminal groups used violence to challengethe state's rules and regulations regardingthe process and outcomes of privatization. The state responded by legal andinstitutional reforms leading tomilitarization and centralization of thepolice force.Successful legal and police reformsinitiated during the early 1990s led to adramatic decline in organized crimeactivities. Crime rates also began tostabilize because of the improvingsocio-economic situation in the country. As a result, by the mid 1990s the characterof criminality began to change. There aresigns that it is increasingly associatedwith the growing social and economicmarginalization of those segments of thepopulation, which did not (or could not)adapt to the introduction of competitivemarkets. The situation was aggravated by arapid decline of employment within theLithuanian economy and significantcurtailment of social welfare provided bythe state. A growing number ofindividuals, especially males with poorskills and education whose employmentopportunities were severely restricted withthe decline in manufacturing industries,were dropping out from the labor force evenin the presence of jobs; were not marrying;and were increasingly plagued by a varietyof social pathologies and health problemsincluding crime, alcoholism, drug abuse,and depression. New forms of entrenchedpoverty unknown during the socialist erasuch as vagabonds and homelessness,including homeless children, has nowdeveloped and is associated with itsapparently inevitable concomitant increasedpetty criminality.     

Resurgence of post-crisis neoliberalism: labor law reform and the return to “business as usual” in Lithuania

ABSTRACT

The economic crisis of 2008–2010 revealed the extreme vulnerability of Lithuania to global financial shocks. However, instead of reforming Lithuanian capitalism, the domestic political and business elites chose to write off the enormous social and economic costs incurred during the 2008–2010 crisis as an expense of continuing doing business in a way that was typical to the pre-crisis, booming years of ‘the Baltic tigers’ (2000–2007), i.e., relying on the unstable and inequitable growth model based on foreign capital inflows and remittances, suppressing and keeping wages and taxes on capital low and exporting cheap-skilled labour to the core EU countries. We illustrate this return to business as usual in Lithuania by analyzing the political process of contestation and eventual consolidation of neo-liberal consensus among domestic political actors that resulted in the passage of the new Labour Code enabling creation of ‘flexible’ labor markets. Social and political implications of the resurgent neoliberal hegemony in post-crisis Lithuania are discussed.