After Transition: The Media in Poland, Russia and China

Colin Sparks

Introduction

It is now nearly twenty years since the great crisis of Communism that led to the struggles, revolts and revolutions of 1989–92. The outcomes of those events have differed widely from place to place. Probably only North Korea survives today as a museum of a fully functioning Stalinist state. Elsewhere, even where the Communist parties continue to hold monopolies of political power, for example, in China, there have been changes, more or less extensive, to the nature of social and economic life. At the other extreme, eight of the European former Communist countries have changed sufficiently as to join the European Union, and two others are preparing for accession. Between the extremes, there are different types of political and economic systems established with a greater or lesser degree of stability.

The variety of different patterns of social organization is mirrored by the different patterns of media system. The rankings of 'Global Press Freedom' produced annually by Freedom House score Estonia and Latvia as "Free" at 17 points (equal 24th with the USA and Canada and one point better than the UK). Poland is "Free" at 20 points (equal 37th with France and two points ahead of Spain). Russia is "Not Free" at 68 points (equal 145th with Afghanistan, Egypt and Ethiopia and one point ahead of Malaysia). China is "Not Free" with 82 points (equal 177th with Vietnam, one point better than Syria and two points better than the Israeli-Occupied Territories/Palestinian Authority). Right down the bottom, number 194 in rank order, definitely "Not Free" and scoring 97 points is North Korea, one point below Burma, Cuba and Turkmenistan (Freedom House 2005). Whatever one makes of the value of the methodology employed to construct these rankings, and it strikes the current author as crude and frankly ideological, there is no doubt that the overall order does illuminate important differences. Other, equally limited, surveys, for example, that produced by Reporters Without Frontiers, differ in detail but produce similar rank orders, although everyone seems to agree that the Nordic countries are tops (Reporters Without Frontiers 2005).

Given that there were some strong similarities in the political and economic systems of all of these states at the start of the process of change, explaining the different outcomes, for the media no less than for the societies as a whole, is a major theoretical and empirical challenge. This paper suggests that the dominant political science tradition of understanding post-communist social change, which is usually, and inelegantly, called 'transitology,' is mistaken in its fundamental approach. Since most studies of the mass media rest, either implicitly or explicitly, upon the same assumptions, it is also the case that much of the writing about media in post-Communist societies has proved unable to theorise the very interesting empirical material it has generated. An alternative approach, that of 'elite continuity,' developed to account for changes on the western fringe of the former Warsaw Pact, is presented as an alternative to explain media change in three major cases: Poland, Russia and China. It is argued that this way of theorizing the processes at stake provides a more satisfactory account of the evidence, and also provides a possible basis for extension to other instances of transition.

The crisis of 'transitology'

The collapse of European communism in 1989–1991 was widely seen as part of the 'third wave' of democratization whose most famous proponent was the US political scientist Samuel Huntington (1991). Scholarly thinking about the events has largely been conducted within the intellectual current often known as 'transitology.' This had been developed a decade or so previously, and had focused most of its attention on the end of European fascism and the military dictatorships that dominated South American politics up to the mid 1980s. The concepts and methods developed to address those processes were extended to try to analyse the new wave of changes. The aim of transitology is to explain explicitly political change from dictatorial to democratic regimes and for them; 'What we refer to as the "transition" is the interval between one political regime and another' (O'Donnnell and Schmitter 1986, 2). With this intellectual background, it is hardly surprising that there has been an underlying assumption that post-Communist change was a process of which led from totalitarian communism to democratization. The bulk of this writing can fairly be termed 'teleological' since it assumes that there was a definite end, democracy as practiced in the 'originator' countries of north-west Europe and North America, towards which countries in transition are inevitably tending. The processes of change can therefore be understood, and judged, by measuring how far along the trajectory towards democracy the countries in question were. Despite the fierce theoretical debates that the term 'democracy' continues to provoke, the consensus amongst authors working in this tradition, however much they disagree about other things, is to follow Schumpeter and to stress a 'minimalist' conception of democracy (O'Donnell 2000, 6–11). As one author put it: 'a transition to democracy is complete when: (I) there is a real possibility of partisan alternation in office, (2) reversible policy changes can result from alternation in office, and (3) effective civilian control has been established over the military.' (Przeworski 1992, 105). In the purer forms of...