Bohle, Dorothee and Greskovits, B�la. Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 393 wouldannexCrimeaandthatRussia-sponsoredseparatistmovementswouldbe in open conflict with the official Ukrainian authorities. Yet the extent to which academic work provides useful insights into the current state of affairs and daunting challenges that the EU and other major actors in the region now face is an undeniable yardstick for assessing the quality of recent publications. This book definitely continues to be a relevant resource for students, teachers and researchers. This is by virtue of its focus on the roots of the EU’s ‘shortcomings’ in Eastern Europe by returning to the origins of ENP and emphasis on the lack of conceptual vision for a region that was always destined to be of sufficient interest for the EU to invest heavily but never quite important enough for membership to be offered. Since the ENP/EaP has always been under the shadow of and is essentially a sub-system of EU relations with Russia readers may wonder why there is no chapter on Russia. Data was gathered for Russia and of course it is with Russia that development of a sustainable and stable partnership has failed so spectacularly and caused Europe’s deepest crisis since the end of the Cold War. Critics may also may argue that the EU’s ‘governance’ approach was rather inevitable given the actual nature of European integration and the strong demands for actors within the region to be granted membership of the EU, making the notion of partnership inevitably idealistic. Nevertheless, this is an important addition to the literature and ought to be on the reading list of any study programme in this field. It provides a useful perspective on why the EU’s engagement with the ‘shared neighbourhood’ has been such as immensely complicated endeavour that may even prove to be — and perhaps Korostoleva ought to say this more openly — a foreign policy challenge actually well beyond the capability of the EU given the kind of foreign policy actor it is. Department of History, Politics and War Studies M. Dangerfield University of Wolverhampton Bohle, Dorothee and Greskovits, Béla. Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery. Cornell Studies in Political Economy. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY and London, 2012. xiv + 287 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Bibliographical references. Index. $26.95 (paperback). It has been a rollercoaster ride. As Dorothee Bohle and Béla Greskovits note in their new book, ‘East Central European capitalism was born amidst the crisis of the 1990s, stayed vulnerable in its aftermath, and proved crisis-prone in the late 2000s’ (p. 2). Nonetheless, standing back from the preoccupations of the present to survey the landscape over the past two and a half decades, the authors of Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery are struck not so much by the SEER, 93, 2, APRIL 2015 394 similarities but by the differences across the post-Communist region. Drawing heavily on the work of Karl Polanyi, they ask ‘[h]ow could so variegated a socioeconomic architecture have been built on and with socialism’s allegedly uniform “ruins”?’ (p. 260). Focusing on the countries that are now nested inside the European Union, Bohle and Greskovits identify three types of capitalism: neoliberalism in the Baltic states, the ‘embedded neoliberalism’ of the Visegrad Four and neocorporatism in Slovenia. Key to explaining variety, they maintain, lies in the interplay of three factors: the initial choices of transformation, the impact of uncertainty and crisis, and transnational and international factors and actors. Apart from marshalling a suitable array of data designed to illuminate rather than overwhelm and displaying detailed knowledge of several economic systems in the region, the great strength of Capitalist Diversity on Europe’s Periphery lies in its intelligent and perceptive analysis of legacies and of international factors. The legacies or inheritances of the past, argue Bohle and Greskovits, ‘are hardly a matter of choice’, but the perception of them can be, ‘especially if the former are complex and controversial and leave ample room for alternative interpretations’ (p. 66). The best chapter in the book is their account of the often-overlooked cases of the Baltic states, showing how in particular Estonia’s neoliberal economic agenda was driven by a nationbuilding agenda and a desire to distance the country from what...