Foreign Experts, Capitalists, and Competing Agendas

Abstract

This article examines privatization and privatization ministries in Poland, Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, and Hungary, stressing the comparability of these organizations and the context in which they originated. The author focuses on the activities and agendas of foreign experts employed or retained by ministries of privatization and the programs they supported. She assesses the degree to which outcomes to date approximated a neoliberal economic agenda of rapid privatization. She distinguishes between (a) opposition to rapid privatization agendas that can be identified with “Leninist legacies” or distributional coalitions attached to the satae industrial sector and (b) promoters of privatization who may work at cross-purposes with supporters of rapid privatization agendas, in particular investment banking firms assisting ministries of privatization. The purpose of the analysis is to suggest the range of capitalist activities surrounding privatization that are emerging in Eastern Europe, adding a further dimension to the dichotomy of Leninist legacies versus “liberal imperatives.” Whether or not enterprise insiders or neoliberal agendas have the upper hand, it most certainly is capitalism that is emerging.