Globalization Under and After Socialism

Abstract

The literature on globalization has often ignored Europe’s periphery and has particularly remained silent on how the structural changes in the world economy beginning in the 1970s affected the ex-socialist world. In the late twentieth century, among the few critical theories that broke from Cold War understandings of socialist political economies was world-systems theory. While making a number of counterintuitive and provocative claims, world-systems theory and its offshoots (including the “dual dependency” perspective) failed to account for the transformations from socialism to postsocialism and took little heed of the institutional realities and contradictions of Soviet socialism by relying on system-functionalist explanations of change. This chapter proposes a framework for an historical-institutionalist account of globalization that considers both structural changes in the capitalist world economy and political and economic reform in the socialist world that prefigured Central and Eastern Europe’s path of transformation after 1989.