Spread of value orientations among political and economic elites in Serbia.

• Author: Lazic, Mladen
• Position: Essay

Abstract: The paper analyses findings of two surveys of value orientations spread among political and economic elites in Serbia, carried out in 1989 and 2003/04. The analysis is focused on two pairs of mutually conflicting orientations: political liberalism vs. authoritarian collectivism, and market liberalism vs. redistributive statism. The spread of these orientations in the two periods is analyzed in the first part of the paper, and it is concluded that liberal values were more present among members of political and economic elites in 2004 than it was the case in 1989. However, the change is not unequivocal and in some cases is smaller than expected. In the second part of the paper, the spread of value orientations among the elites in 2004 is analyzed more thoroughly, using larger sets of data. The findings show that political and economic elites in Serbia have not adopted liberal values as clearly dominant framework of orientation, even after pluralist democracy and market economy based on private ownership have been largely implemented and have been made legitimate principles of social regulation. Values of both groups are widely inconsistent and composed of mixture of liberal and collectivistic patterns. The value inconsistency may be found in the sphere of political and of economic subsystems, and it is equally characteristic of political and of economic elite, in both subsystems.

Keywords: Serbia, Yugoslavia, social stratification, elites, social change, postsocialist transformation

1. Introduction

   Surveys of economic and political elites have not been made very often in Serbia. The first one, organized in late 1960s', was based mostly on ad hoc methodology (represented by a combination of open-ended interviews and unsystematic analysis of some structural data--on social origin, for example) and was not endowed with any developed theoretical framework. The study was published in English only, and was quoted very seldom in the works of Serbian sociologists (cf. Barton, Denitch and Kadushin, 1973). Later on, data on elites were collected as a part of general stratification surveys, based on proportionate samples, with the necessary consequence that members of higher strata were only marginally represented in these samples. Also structural and value characteristics of elites' members were not studied in detail. These characteristics were instead only sporadically included in the analyses of general relations among social strata (of the system of distribution of social wealth, power, and reputation; or of studies of value orientations; cf. Popovic, 1977; Popovic, 1991).

   The reasons for the lack of interests for elite studies in Serbia are relatively clear. We can find them primarily in the low level of development of empirical sociological research in the country. Namely, it cannot be argued that studies of the ruling class in socialist Yugoslavia represented "forbidden territory", for the simple reason that a small number of such researches that were conducted were completed without serious obstacles from the authorities. A survey on political and economic elites was organized by me on the territory of former Yugoslavia (SFRY) at the end of the 1980s, as a part of a larger stratification research. The survey was successfully completed without any obstruction, even if it was done at a huge sample for this kind of research, consisting of 400 respondents (elites' members) in each of the six republics and two provinces (cf. Lazic, 1994). Contrary to the obvious public interest (confirmed, for example, by numerous media articles about "new riches" and new members of political elite), extremely small number of sociological surveys of new elites have been conducted, and moreover, empirical data that were collected in my surveys (1993, 1997, and 2003/04) have been only occasionally used (cf. Lazic, 1994; Lazic, ed. 1995; Lazic, 2000; Lazic and Cvejic, 2006).

   It is quite clear that marginal research interest in the elites' studies (in Serbia and also in other postsocialist countries, since the time of the huge comparative survey, done by Szelenyi--cf. Szelenyi and Szelenyi, 1995) contradicts general agreement among social scientists about the central role of elites in socialism, in the establishment and reproduction of the dominant system of social relations, and about the elites as the key actors in contemporary transformation of socialist order into capitalist system. In a previous paper I defined elites as the social groups that control the resources accumulated, resources that are necessary for the reproduction of the basic conditions upon which a given (or potential) way of production of social life rests (cf. Lazic, in Highly and Lengyel, 2000). The obvious outcome is that nomenklatura members in socialism controlled not only the political and economic subsystems, but also the sphere of social integration in which value system was reproduced1. On the other hand, the breakdown of socialist order was above all the result of the impossibility of dominant system of relations to continue reproducing. The manifestation of this impossibility was primarily the deep economic crisis that finally led to the massive rebellion of the population. In other words, the collapse was not the result of collective actions of a specific social

   group (a class) that wanted to install a new form of social order: the new order (capitalist economic system and political democracy) was simply taken over from the West (Lazic, 1994). This has been the reason why the main actors of systemic change in Central and Eastern Europe have become newly formed elites. Among their members, it has been possible to identify in different proportions, in various countries, old nomenklatura officials; former middle class people: intellectuals--members of political opposition' groups; professionals--owners of cultural capital; small entrepreneurs--owners of economic capital, etc. (see research findings on social origin of new political and economic elites in ten postsocialist countries, in Szelenyi and Szelenyi, 1995; for Serbia, see Lazic and Cvejic, 2006).

   As demonstrated earlier, nomenklatura members themselves had contradictory interests: to preserve socialist system of reproduction, in which they had privileged social positions; but also to introduce capitalist system, in order to secure intergeneration transfer of their dominant social status (this transfer was almost impossible in socialism--cf. Lazic, 1994). (2) Moreover, it became clear soon after the system changed, that social status of the middle class, whose members represented the most numerous participants in social movements that led to the removal of socialist system, was significantly improved in all postsocialist countries. It should be added, however, that in addition to structural preconditions of systemic change, general delegitimization of socialist order also played a very important role in it. It meant that strong intrusion of liberal-capitalist value orientations, adversary to the ruling normative and value system, preceded the breakdown of socialism. The carriers of these new value patterns were again not only the middle class members, but also members of the new (and even old) elites. According to the same logic, general social acceptance of the new value system, and primarily its spread among the elites' members, makes the precondition for stabilization of institutions by which newly formed social order reproduces itself. Namely, value system represents the basis of legitimacy of the ruling system of social relations, and in this way it supports patterns of behavior within established political and economic subsystems (cf. Inglehart, 1997).

2. Transformational elites and value change in Serbia

   When speaking about postsocialist transformation in Serbia, we have to bear in mind that it has been significantly different from analogous processes in other European countries in both structural and value aspects. First of all, the fact that the transformation in Serbia was blocked for ten years (see more on the concept "blocked transformation", in Lazic, Lazic ed. 2000) had important consequences for the constitution of the new elites, as I already mentioned. Namely, individuals who did not belong to former nomenklatura could hardly access the political and economic elites in large number before the second half of 1990s' (Lazic and Cvejic, 2006). This also meant that majority of the new elites' members, who put the basis of the new social system, originated from groups that only recently promoted and (using monopolistic power) even coerced socialist value system. However, value system in Serbia itself (and for that matter, in the former Yugoslavia) was specific that it represented extremely inconsistent mixture of value patterns, characteristic for authoritarian socialist societies on one hand and for liberal market social relations on the other hand. Well known historical facts explain such inconsistency: Yugoslav socialism was, since 1950s', built as quasi-liberal system, very much opened toward Western influences in the economy and even more in the sphere of culture. Yet another fact is very important for the understanding of previous (and contemporary) dominant value orientations here: socialist order in Serbia was established inside a society that had started a process of modernization very late (not before the last third of the nineteenth century) and was, additionally, very slow in introducing market economy instead of self-subsistence peasant economy all the way...