Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery

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 Béla 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.

Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery focuses on post-1990 East-Central Europe.... The result is an absolutely masterful analysis, sharply argued and beautifully written. I believe it is set to become a classic in the field of transition studies., Bohle and Greskovits... have given us a much better starting point for comparative analysis of the development of types of capitalism in the region they study than any other currently available., Bohle and Greskovits have produced a generally solid comparative study of developments in former state socialist.... They have developed a comprehensive framework for explaining the divergences.... A much better starting point for comparative analysis of the development of types of capitalism in the region they study than any other currently available., Bohle and Greskovits see three distinct approaches: the 'neoliberalism' that characterizes the Baltic states and favors market efficiency over the other two concerns; the "embedded liberalism" of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, which softens the pursuit of market efficiency and pays greater attention to welfare policies; and Slovenia's 'neocorporatist' approach, which seeks to cushion the effects of marketization on particular segments of society. In this tightly argued comparative study, the authors also explore how these three clusters of countries have dealt with their socialist legacies and with the imperatives imposed by a liberal global economy and the financial and economic crisis that it has lately generated., Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits examine the varying forms that capitalism has taken in east central Eurpoe, offering a new typology of capitalist democracies informed importantly by the work of Karl Polanyi's early analysis of twentieth-century capitalist development in Europe.... The nuance and clarity of the analysis allow the book to engage multiple debates on postcommunist political and economic reform.

Dorothee Bohle is Associate Professor of Political Science at Central European University and the author of Europe's New Periphery: Poland's Transformation and Transnational Integration. Béla Greskovits is Professor of International Relations and European Studies at Central European University and the author of The Political Economy of Protest and Patience: East European and Latin American Transformations Compared.