Capitalism from Outside?

Violetta Zentai is Director at the Center for Policy Studies, Central European University. János Mátyás Kovács is Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna; Lecturer at the Department of Economics, Loránd Eötvös University, Budapest; External Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Does capitalism emerging in Eastern Europe need as solid ethnic or spiritual foundations as some other "Great Transformations" in the past? Apparently, one can become an actor of the new capitalist game without belonging to the German, Jewish, or, to take a timely example, Chinese minority. Nor does one have to go to a Protestant church every Sunday, repeat Confucian truisms when falling asleep, or study Adam Smith's teachings on the virtues of the market in a business course. He/she may just follow certain quasi-capitalist routines acquired during communism and import capitalist culture (more exactly, various capitalist cultures) in the form of down-to-earth cultural practices embedded in freshly borrowed economic and political institutions. Does capitalism come from outside? Why do then so many analysts talk about hybridization?

Contents; Prologue PART 1. ENTREPRENEURSHIP: HYBRIDIZATION "UNDER INFLUENCE"? Czechs under "Italian rule". The Zivnostenska Bank Embedded encounters and global aspirations. The RBA Zagreb The rise of a banking empire in Eastern Europe. The Raiffeisen Bank International From local to global and vice versa. Transforming food and drink industries in Eastern Europe Between Hauzmajstor and Komon sens. Repatriate entrepreneurship in Serbia A small miracle without foreign investors. The Villany wine and westernized local knowledge Cherishing informality and emulating the West. The success story of the Transylvania General Import Export Company PART 2. STATE GOVERNANCE: FROM TAKING TO RESISTING WESTERN NORMS Cloning or Hybridization? East-West encounters in the SAPARD program Transmitting Western norms to the East: The SAPARD program as a hybrid. Mutual adaptation versus hybridization: rural development programs in Eastern Europe From diligent pupils to noisy resisters. MEPs from Eastern Europe Mladen Lazic: (Mis)understanding each other's priorities: the Topola rural development program PART 3. ECONOMIC KNOWLEDGE: DOES ANYTHING GO? New knowledge - old behaviour. Reforming economic education in Eastern Europe Mixing etatism with liberalism. Eastern European think tanks in the world of applied economics Soft institutionalism. Receiving new institutional economics in Croatia Beyond the basic instinct? On the reception of new institutional economics in Eastern Europe The spread of Western ideas and the economics epistemic community in Romania Epilogue