Post-State Socialism: A Diversity of Capitalisms?

The disintegration of the state socialist societies in the early 1990s left ambiguous the type of political and economic order which was to replace them. Their fall was not a consequence of the classical pattern of revolution, in which an alternative ex ante economic system was postulated in the political policy of the reformers. The major systemic changes advocated by the reformers were the removal of the dominant Communist Party and its replacement by democratic forms and a move to markets in place of centralized planning. There was no major claim that capitalism would form an alternative economic and political system. Only after the Communists had left power was capitalism publicly advocated as a means to further democracy and public well-being. The new leaders in these societies, in alliance with those in the hegemonic capitalist world, set out to create, on the ashes of state socialism, a social system having a capitalist market economy, a polyarchic polity and a pluralist civil society. Such intentions, however, left problematic the component parts of the type of capitalism which might be constructed and the ways that a system transfer could be effected on the institutions of state socialism. The most favoured economic model is that of neo-liberalism, the Anglo-American type of capitalism, which was adopted by the major policy makers. (On the components of this policy, see Williamson 1990).