ABSTRACT
The EU enlargement towards Eastern Europe has often been characterised as one of the greatest achievements of the EU. In less than 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a divided Europe, even some of the poorest Eastern European former communist states had become members of the EU. The countries went from Communism to being integrated members of the EU in a process where not only state institutions, commerce, professional practices and norms underwent changes, but also knowledge, categories and understandings transformed towards a new reality. As Adler-Nissen and Kropp note in the introduction to this special issue, the
integration process of the EU, and thus also the enlargement process, consisted of a co-production between specific agents’ trajectories, investments and social scientific knowledge. It was not only the production of knowledge that was important, equally important was dissemination of knowledge and education of local agents to take part in promoting new possibilities of societal transformation. The integration of the Eastern European countries into the EU was not an inevitable process, but a process supported by a host of international organisations, think tanks, private foundations, law firms and universities that invested massively in export of discourses, policies and social and legal categories in order to assist the development towards a market economy and new forms of state power. Through new forms of knowledge and state practices, the intention was to rebuild the Eastern European states on the basis of democracy and a market economy protected by strong legal institutions. A telling illustration of the directions some of the Eastern European countries could have taken and of the overall dominating paradigm underpinning cultures, practices and interpretive frameworks in Eastern Europe is the events in Bulgaria after 1989. For the extraordinary party congress on 30 January 1990, a draft statute was prepared that suggested a de-Stalinization of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The leaders of the party urged ‘a new type of contemporary Marxist party’. The draft documents suggested abandoning the nomenklartura system at all levels and replacing it with ‘political pluralism, freedom of religion, a ‘market-oriented economy within a socialist state’ and the separation of legislative, executive, and legal powers’. (Report on Eastern Europe: Weekly Record of Events, 2 February 1990, 53). Within the party, several opinions existed about the direction the party and society should take. Some of the persons from the party told a press conference on 17 January 1990 that ‘Bulgaria did not suffer so much from Socialism as from an underdevelopment of Socialism’ (Report on Eastern Europe: Weekly Record of Events, 2 February 1990). Opposition parties and groups developed as well, with the Union of Democratic Forces as the strongest. However, the Communist Party had control of the press and thus, in order to be able to take part in public politics in general and in the round table talks in particular, the opposition parties demanded the rights and means to publish their own dailies and weeklies; they demanded office space, press facilities as well as broadcasting time on radio and television (Report on Eastern Europe: Weekly Record of Events, 2 February 1990, 52). The opposition parties tried to delegitimise the Communists and legitimise themselves as the natural heirs of power through publishing hitherto concealed knowledge about, for example, ecological disasters and human rights violations. And through new factual knowledge and claims to Western human rights concepts, the opposition tried to redefine and rewrite the conditions and history of the country. They attempted to produce knowledge based on a liberal paradigm and to get legitimate positions to write a new authentic history of the country and promote policy visions for apparently inevitable future developments. Moreover, opposition parties aimed at being able to distribute such knowledge. Changing the state of mind of the citizens, the countries’ expert knowledge and the dispositions and
248 Ole Hammerslev
habitual orientation of the experts in the countries was an enormous challenge, just as it was also a huge challenge to change their beliefs in state institutions. However, legitimate discourses, state models, law and new forms of expertise were to a large extent produced in Western fields of power and exported to the East, where they became part of the national struggles. This article examines how the production and export of legal develop-
ment programmes to Eastern Europe after 1989 were closely related to policy visions in the West by following the trajectories of different programmes on a micro-level. The article focuses on the programmes directed towards Bulgaria and illustrates how the programmes were imported in Bulgaria and used in a larger struggle in the field of state power. First, the article introduces its methodological framework in which it
uses the concept of co-production to examine the relation between knowledge production and state transformation. In order to get tools to examine the agents that produce such knowledge and state forms, it uses the Bourdieusian theoretical tools. Hereafter, there is a discussion on the transformation of the law and development movement, and the article examines how this transformation unfolded in parallel with the changes in Eastern Europe. Whereas US agents were crucial to the first developments, the EU invented their own programmes focusing on specific forms of knowledge and state transformation that also changed with the further developments of Eastern Europe. The last part of the article concerns these pan-European developments.
