INTRODUCTION

The major part of the regulatory structures in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was built during the age of the Washington Consensus. The term Washington Consensus usually refers to a set of policies advocating economic liberalization, privatization, and fiscal austerity, which were initially designed in the 1980s and 1990s by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury to respond to the economic crisis in Latin America. Later, a similar set of policies was applied to former communist countries in CEE. As we know today, the Washington Consensus had a strong antistatist bias. More attention was paid to courts, judges, property law, and contracts, and less to administrative agencies, civil servants, and regulatory policies needed to implement various developmental policies of the state. The neoliberal ideology underpinning the Washington Consensus was antistatist in the sense that it did not provide much room for the state as a regulator of economic activity. According to the mentality of the time, “the main thing that needed to be done was to get the state out of the way, and somehow everything else would take care of itself.” The only role left for the state was to protect property rights, enforce contracts, and protect against arbitrary use of governmental power. Apart from that, the market was considered the optimal mechanism for regulating the economic activity. As succinctly argued by David Kennedy, the aim of the legal program of neoliberalism “was not an improved exercise of state power but to disentangle the state from the market and establish more effective restrains on government rent-seeking and public choice bickering. All this was to be done by law.”