| The democratic potential of Information and Communication Technologies has been of interest to transitional governments since mid 1990s. New challenges emerged with the stabilization of the Balkans and its reorientation towards peace, stability, democracy and a European future.; Driven by a broader question of how ICTs influence democratic transitions, this study focuses on the problems in the pursuit of national Information Society policies, which require European e-governance standards for the candidate states. We examine the cases of Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro. Slovenia is used as a success case---the first Yugoslav successor state to become a full EU member and a leader in Information Society governance. Serbia and Montenegro are studied as problem cases, where early transitions began with strong commitments towards the informatization of their societies, yet failed because of the unexpected occurrences and internal blockages.; Given that the EU has set criteria for the Information Society development in the candidate countries, we explore the reasons for significant variations in their ability to achieve these objectives. The main hypothesis is that, while successful informatization may be attributed partly to techno-economic factors, the critical impediments to the ICT-based modernization of institutions are non-technological in nature. We propose a two level explanation: on the state level, differences in the successful informatization of governance depend on the interplay of four factors---the nation state building process, the development of the knowledge economy, the quality of public administration and the role of political leadership.; Deeper analysis reveals that these factors are further shaped by intra-systemic power struggles between the agents of change and the status quo keepers that had captured critical parts of the state for private and covert purposes.; The transformative power of technology does not exist in isolation, but grows in step with the transformative action taken by change agents. The more the democratic change process reaches a sustained level, the more it undermines the internal forces of reaction and increases the number of pressure points for cross-institutional cooperation and informatization. Only then can ICTs achieve their full potential in enabling democratic interaction and institutional change. |
