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Presentation speakers
- Katalin Ferber, Freie University Berlin
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Abstract:
The fall of socialist systems in East and Central Europe has unintended consequences, such as surprising failures of previously strong economic and stable social regimes in the region. The „standard” neoliberal policy what was advised to the core countries (Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary) have recently demonstrated the failure of neoliberal ideology and policy. The presentation analyses a relatively neglected area of the „new” and „capitalist” systems in East-Central Europe. Between 1989 and 1995 the Western advisors aid-organisations and officially helping institutes in the region were completely unaware, that the „new system” they assisted to create was not built against the old regime, but functioned as a continuous process of the old. The first part of the paper analyses some fundamental policy suggestions in the region along the neoliberal economic and financial concepts. I argue, that the acceptance of the neoliberal ideas and practice demonstrated in the region (especially in Russia) that dogmatic market ideology can replace a dogmatic socialist one because the former almost fully utilised the latter one. The „cookbook capitalism” what the core countries accepted, two decades later restructured the entire region both economically and financially. The second part of the presentation shed light on the double facet-capitalism, what seemingly compatible to any other EU members’ ones, but in reality clearly distant and completely new. Using primary sources and the author’s conducted case studies, socialist values and egalitarian principles did not disappear from the transitional economies. Rather, those ideas were transferred into nationalist and populist polities, which in several countries paved the way toward a new regime. As a conclusion, I use a pioneering concept on the Janus-faced new capitalism, which states that injecting „Western” ideas to „Eastern” practice constitutes a blurred line between public and private, between institutional and personal. This can be one of the important explanations for the recent right-wing movements and their success to legitimise their cause.
