The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. By Gil Eyal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xxix + 238.
Many social scientists have noted that the popular carnivals that accompanied the revolutions of 1989 did not last. When the masses returned home, the same nomenklatura elite remained in power, even if it had to share power with a new democratically elected political elite. [1] 1989 was not a year of social revolutions but of political upheavals. Since post-Communist civil societies are feeble or absent, elites have a far broader maneuvering space than elites in other democratic contexts. [2] Elite theory is increasingly useful and used for the analysis of post-Communist politics and societies. In the Czech and Slovak contexts, it is striking to note that the division of Czechoslovakia was agreed upon by the respective political elites in 1992 without popular approval. It is unlikely that the division of Czechoslovakia would have been ratified in a plebiscite. Accordingly, sociologist Gil Eyal attempts to understand the division of Czechoslovakia as neither the result of deep historical rifts between the Czech and Slovak peoples, nor of conflicting economic interests, nor of unintended game-theoretic implications of the 1968 Czechoslovak federal constitution, but of a deal between two conflicting wings of what he calls the Czechoslovak “new class.” Eyal’s new class is composed of “knowledge experts,” bureaucrats, the intelligentsia, managers, and technocrats. Since the Slovak elite has had a federalist, pro-Czech faction, and a nationalist, anti-federalist faction since the early twentieth century, Eyal’s interesting question is: How did the Czech and Slovak elites come to agree on the dismantling of a federation that held for three-quarters of a century?
