Alina Mungiu-Pippidi

Moldova’s 'Twitter Revolution'

Few Europeans had heard of Moldova, a tiny state on the EUs eastern flank, before seeing images of the strife that broke out there in early April 2009 after the Communist Party (PCRM) won reelection in a landslide. Except for their international context, the events in Moldova did not differ substantially from those that sparked the color revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, but this difference in context led to a different outcome. What was missing in Moldova? The short answer is a unified opposition that could put itself in the drivers seat.

Controlling Corruption Through Collective Action

Control of corruption in a society is an equilibrium between resources and costs which either empowers or constraints elites predatory behaviour. While most research and practice focuses on legal constraints, this paper investigates normative constraints, deemed to be more important, especially civil society and the press. Fresh evidence—both historical and statistical—is found to support Tocqueville’s assertions regarding the importance of collective action and the joint action of media and associations in not only creating a democratic society, but controlling corruption as well. However, little is known on how to build normative constraints.

Deconstructing Balkan particularism: the ambiguous social capital of Southeastern Europe

This article is concerned with particularism in the post‐communist Balkans. First, it discusses notions such as particularism and social capital in a post‐communist context, attempting to relate these two concepts to each other. Second, it provides a descriptive picture of particularism, informal behaviour and social capital in Southeast Europe based on a comparative survey conducted in 2003 in five countries: Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Third, it constructs explanatory models of social capital and discusses the policy implications for the region’s Europeanization.

The Other Transition

The paper argues that the history of the postcommunist transition can be rewritten as a renegotiation of a social contract between state and society after Communism. A strong state based on coercion alone is not sustainable, as it is not based on a social contract. Repression is costly, and once the global order of communism broke down, communist regimes, lacking legitimacy, vanished. The communist state’s strength and the extent to which it invaded the private lives of its citizens varied greatly across Eastern Europe; so did the autonomy of the society. This was no simple linear relationship. But the relationship between state and society under communism best explains the divergent paths taken by the former communist countries after 1989.

The Transformative Power of Europe Revisited

Abstract:Why has the EU succeeded in promoting democracy in the new member states but failed in promoting good governance? This essay seeks to answer this question first by distinguishing governance from political regimes, and second by exploring to what extent national governance—which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that determine who gets what in a given country—is susceptible to being improved by external pressure or intervention. It concludes that improving governance remains a challenge even for the democratic character of the European project.

Civil Society and Control of Corruption: Assessing Governance of Romanian Public Universities.

This article investigates the public perception of corruption in Romanian higher education. It reviews the governance practices of public universities in Romania through a survey of governance practices organized by the Romanian Coalition for Clean Universities 1 (CCU), an alliance of NGOs, professional associations and student and teacher unions. CCU systematically monitored and investigated 42 Romanian state universities during the academic years 2007-2009. 2 The goal of the survey was to assess the Romanian public universities’ governance, checking for the integrity, fairness and ability to control corruption of their procedures. The methodology of the project will be explained in detail in the second part of this paper. In the first, we shall review the meanings, causes and consequences of corruption and bad governance in the field of education and the particular context of postcommunist Europe. In the third (and last) section the results of the survey and some lessons learned will be presented.

The Splintering of Postcommunist Europe

There are two radically different versions of the postcommunist narrative. One tells the triumphal tale of the only world region in which the reforms recommended by the “Washington consensus” worked. The other and more realistic account speaks of a historic window of opportunity that lasted for only a quarter-century, during which efforts by the West and patriotic elites of Central and Eastern Europe managed to drag the region into Europe proper, leaving Europe and Russia pitted against each other along the old “civilizational” border between them. This essay argues that while Institutional choices matter in the postcommunist world, geopolitical and civilizational boundaries still set the horizons of political possibility.

Perpetual Transitions: Contentious Property and Europeanization in South-Eastern Europe

This article studies comparatively the property restitution policies of Eastern and Western Balkan countries, focusing mostly on internal and external constraints to a permanent solution. The role of the European Court of Human Rights is analyzed in depth, as well as the subtle shift of policy of the EU institutions from the earlier Eastern Balkan accession to the Western Balkans one. While the situation of property restitution in South-Eastern Europe provides clear evidence that Europeanization helps transformation, particularly if the EU openly assumes the role of a transformation agent, it also highlights the limits of its power.

Learning from Virtuous Circles

Abstract:Once of interest mainly to specialists, the problem of explaining how institutions change is now a primary concern not only of economists, but of the international donor community as well. Many have come to believe that political institutions are decisive in shaping economic institutions and, with them, the course of innovation and investment that leads to a developed society. This is the shift from patrimonialism to ethical universalism, a transformation that most of today’s advanced democracies accomplished through a long historical evolution. But there has been very little research on whether and how this kind of change can be engineered and speeded up by human design. The EU-funded ANTICORRP project that I have been leading aims to help fill this gap. The big challenge is to explain the shift of the governance paradigm from particularism to universalism in the few societies that have managed to accomplish it in the postwar era. Do these success stories offer any lessons about how other societies can make that journey?

Transformative Power of Europe

Why has the EU succeeded in promoting democracy in the new member states but failed in promoting good governance? This essay seeks to answer this question first by distinguishing governance from political regimes, and second by exploring to what extent national governance — which is defined as the set of formal and informal institutions that determine who gets what in a given country — is susceptible to being improved by external pressure or intervention. It concludes that improving governance remains a challenge even for the democratic character of the European project.