Book Launch: Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery co-authored by Dorothee Bohle and Bela Greskovits

Type: 
Book Launch
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 9, Faculty Tower
Room: 
Gellner Room
Monday, November 5, 2012 - 5:15pm
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Date: 
Monday, November 5, 2012 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm
Central European University and the Political Economy Research Group, CEU, cordially invite you to a book launch and related roundtable discussion
 
on
 
Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery
co-authored by
Dorothee Bohle and Bela Greskovits
 
Date: Monday, November 5, 2012
Time: 5:15 p.m.
Location: Gellner Room (Nador u. 9)
Welcome: John Shattuck, President and Rector, CEU
Chair: Imre Gergely Szabo, Student Chair of PERG, CEU
Participants: Dorothee Bohle, Department of Political Science, CEU
Laszlo Bruszt, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence
Laszlo Csaba, Department of International Relations, CEU; Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Bela Greskovits, Department of Political Science and International Relations, CEU
Lucia Kurekova, Slovak Governance Institute, Bratislava
Participants: Dorothee Bohle, Department of Political Science, CEU
Laszlo Bruszt, Department of Political and Social Sciences, European University Institute, Florence
Laszlo Csaba, Department of International Relations, CEU; Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Bela Greskovits, Department of Political Science and International Relations, CEU
Lucia Kurekova, Slovak Governance Institute, Bratislava
 
RSVP to perg@ceu.hu by Sunday, November 4.
 
With the collapse of the socialist system, East European societies 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 financial crisis of 1997, and the ongoing great recession.

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.