Understanding Nascent Capitalism in Eastern Europe

János Mátyás Kovács, a famous scholar from the Austrian Institute for Human Sciences delivered a lecture on his project on June, 23 at the working seminar of LCSS.

János Mátyás Kovács, a famous scholar from the Austrian Institute for Human Sciences delivered a lecture on his project on June, 23 at the working seminar of LCSS.

Professor Kovács is in charge of the project which studies genesis of capitalism in Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Russia, Romania, Poland and Serbia). Primary targets of the project are to analyze the state of comparative studies in each of those countries at the moment and to develop a new approach for comparison of these emerging capitalisms.

To begin with, the lecturer stated certain questions. He articulated why we can speak of Serbian, Romanian or Polish capitalism as of separate phenomena. He also explained how various, region-dependent types of capitalism can still exist in the epoch of globalization and integration.

The basic scheme of his research can be represented as “Tradition-Emulation-Invention”. Institutional capitalistic changes in economy can have 3 roots. These are either former traditions of capitalism, or emulation and copying of other systems (such as American or Western European), or a new system is developed from the very beginning.

One of his assumptions is that the new capitalistic regimes of the Eastern Europe differ from the others for a number of reasons. At first, they are descendants of communism. The second reason is that 2 strong capitalistic systems (Western European and American) influenced them in the period of genesis. The third is that they are still unstable and changing.

Professor Kovács named 4 research fields where the project is implemented: proprietary rights and regime privatization, institutions of market regulation, welfare regimes, and political economy.

In conclusion, he mentioned that the main problem of these regimes is stability as working structures and institutions which should support them still do not exist.