Slovakia

Social science research on Slovakia dealing with networking is scattered and scarce. Two reasons can be cited to explain this shortcoming: the first is the recent historical origin of the country, and the second is that the specificity of postsocialism has often led scholars to take the widespread importance of social networks in eastern Europe for granted. Here it must be underscored that social networks can be analytical instruments for dealing with institutional arrangements and interpersonal relations.

The youngest among the central eastern European countries, Slovakia originated in 1993 as a separate nation out of the peaceful split with Czech Republic. The country has a long story of foreign domination, being part of the Hungarian Kingdom and subsequently of the Habsburg Empire until the foundation of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Slovakia, with a population of about five million (10 percent of whom are Hungarians), is one of the most dynamic postsocialist economies in eastern Europe. Slovakia joined the European Union in 2004 and is the second eastern European country to have entered the Eurozone.

The difficult transition to democracy and market economy in eastern Europe has been explained with reference to the resiliency of socialist practices such as the importance attributed to personal networks, informal economy, clientelism, familism, and corruption. Many of these practices, however, have found momentum in the postsocialist period. Two approaches are used to identify those patterns of social and economic transformation, which characterize the country's responses to macro changes. The first follows the distinction between [Page 780]formal and informal networks. The second follows Mark Granovetter's distinction between weak and strong ties. Both positions have demonstrated that bipolarity between formal and informal networks and between strong (kin based) and weak (friendship) ties is not simply a historical product but constitutes a strategic answer to social uncertainty and inequality in recent times.

Concerning the first approach, the intermingling of formal and informal networks is reported in Slovak firms, which have shown strong levels of inward embeddedness in supply networks. This has proven to be a successful strategy to cope with the massive inflow of foreign investment after the second half of the 1990s and has eventually been used as an asset by those multinationals who built upon existing networks. Similar outcomes have been registered in the context of small enterprises such as in tourism or the clothing industry. Adrian Smith demonstrates that in the Slovak clothing industry, a large number of actor networks work to construct relations of power in dynamic ways through the process of commodity production. A similar position is reached by analyses of the transformation of the agricultural sector, which in Slovakia has experienced problematic restructuration under the privatization scheme of 1992–97. A tendency to privilege cooperative forms versus private enterprises has roots in the inability of private farmers to reconstruct and fruitfully benefit from social and economic networks at the local and national level. The number of postsocialist agricultural cooperatives presently active is not a function of a cultural tendency toward privileging horizontal ties but marks the resiliency of socialist networks and structures still efficiently working to gain access to funding and development projects.

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