The Round Table negotiations that opened in mid-June 1989 signaled the end of the monopoly rule of Hungary's Communist Party. In over three months of intensive negotiations, representatives of the ruling and major opposition parties hammered out the new rules of the political game covering the constitution, registration of political organizations, election procedures, the mass media, and the disposition of the coercive apparatus of the state. But although negotiations in six economic subcommittees (charged with property relations, antitrust regulations, budgetary matters, and the like) were held parallel to the political discussions, no decisive agreements were reached on the economic front. The problem was not that the committees were deadlocked, for in fact the experts representing the various sides of the negotiations shared a common framework that should have made consensus possible. The failure to rewrite the rules of the economic game rested more in the otganizational composition of the negotiating partners. The political rules could be restructured because the key actors with an immediate stake in the newly redefined political field were all at the negotiating table. The rules of a new economic order, however, could not be rewritten because the key actors in the economy were decidedly absent.

As we saw in the preceding chapter, the actors at the Round Table were the would-be parties of an anticipated competitive polity. Rather than mutually denouncing disparate legitimating claims to represent society, they established the preconditions for progress in the Round Table negotiations that the organizations on both sides temporarily suspend the claim to speak in the name of society and that the personalities in the negotiations speak as representatives of political parties. It was in this capacity that they could reconstruct an electoral system in which society would have its chance to speak. The economic negotiations, by contrast, were paralyzed by this very framing of the Round Table structure in which the parties to the negotiation were exactly that —parties, not capital and labor, not peak associations, not corporate groupings, not employers’ associations, not trade unions. There could be no decisive, binding agreements about economic matters in the Round Table context because the negotiations did not include the key economic actors with the greatest stakes in the new rules restructuring the economy.