Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, by Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012, 304 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 7815 4, $78.95, hardback; $26.95, paperback. The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio‐Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic Model, edited by Jeffrey Sommers and Charles Woolfson. Routledge, London, 2014, 200 pp., ISBN: 978 0 415 82003 5, £85.00, hardback.

AuthorGuglielmo Meardi
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12115
Published date01 March 2015
Date01 March 2015
BOOK REVIEWS
Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery, by Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits.
Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2012, 304 pp., ISBN: 978 0 8014 7815 4,
$78.95, hardback; $26.95, paperback.
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Neoliberal Baltic
Model, edited by Jeffrey Sommers and Charles Woolfson. Routledge, London,
2014, 200 pp., ISBN: 978 0 415 82003 5, £85.00, hardback.
Here are two books on new EU member-states that are as different as they are
complementary. Both tackle the puzzle of what sort of capitalism, including labour
relations, has been created in post-communist countries — a problem that has become
much more than academic due to a number of spillover effects for Western Europe,
through migration, relocations and policy experiments.
The first book comes from Budapest but covers all of the 11 post-communist new
member-states. While Hungary may be only a medium-sized country hidden by an
unintelligible language, for some structural reasons as well as serendipitous coinci-
dences, it has produced, over 40 years, the most influential books on socioeconomic
relations under communism and afterwards: from Haraszti’s A Worker in a Workers’
State (1977), to Kornai’s The Socialist System (1988), Burawoy and Lukács’ The
Radiant Past (1992), and Stark and Bruszt’s Post-Socialist Pathways (1998). Bohle
and Greskovits’ book can definitely claim a place in this list by providing a systematic
and theoretically sound analysis of how and why capitalism differs across the whole
region. Indeed, the book starts from where Stark and Bruszt had left: the initial
choices of elites at the end of communism did mark the subsequent path of each
country — but how and why did these paths subsequently covary into regional
clusters?
While Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery does not focus on industrial rela-
tions specifically, its Polanyian framework gives primary importance to social and
labour issues and is of obvious relevance for BJIR readers. Bohle and Greskovits have
published important political economy work on post-communist Central Europe for
two decades, and bring into this magnum opus an imposing amount of factual knowl-
edge and theoretical competence: the literature review in the initial and final chapters
is by itself invaluable for anybody interested in the region.
The most important aspect of the book, however, is its argument, which is spelled
out in the first chapter. From Polanyi, the authors draw first of all the importance of
the distinction between political and economic sphere under capitalism, which leads
them to give much more prominence to the state than is done by the varieties of
capitalism approach. Subsequently, they elaborate on Polanyi’s triadic scheme of
government (i.e. its accountability), market and welfare state, turning it into a
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12115
53:1 March 2015 0007–1080 pp. 159–180
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

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