With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance
in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc
had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they
found, was not a single set of political-economic relations.
Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to
become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee
Bohle and Bela Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in
each country, the assets and liabilities left behind by socialism,
the transformational strategies embraced by political and
technocratic elites, and the influence of transnational actors and
institutions. They also evaluate the impact of three regional
shocks: the recession of the early 1990s, the rolling global
financial crisis that started in July 1997, and the political
shocks that attended EU enlargement in 2004.
Bohle and Greskovits show that the postsocialist states have
established three basic variants of capitalist political economy:
neoliberal, embedded neoliberal, and neocorporatist. The Baltic
states followed a neoliberal prescription: low controls on capital,
open markets, reduced provisions for social welfare. The larger
states of central and eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, and the
Czech and Slovak republics) have used foreign investment to
stimulate export industries but retained social welfare regimes and
substantial government power to enforce industrial policy. Slovenia
has proved to be an outlier, successfully mixing competitive
industries and neocorporatist social inclusion. Bohle and
Greskovits also describe the political contention over such
arrangements in Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia. A highly original
and theoretically sophisticated typology of capitalism in
postsocialist Europe, this book is unique in the breadth and depth
of its conceptually coherent and empirically rich comparative
analysis."
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