Book Reviews

Society and Economy 35 (2013) 2, pp. 263–271 DOI: 10.1556/SocEc.35.2013.2.8 BOOK REVIEWS Lajos Bokros Accidental Occidental. Economics and Culture of Transition in Mitteleuropa, the Baltic and the Balkan Area Budapest – New York: CEU Press, 2013, 192 pp. ISBN 978-615-5225-24-6 Lajos Bokros is one of the most prominent and well-known professionals of the post-communist region. He has had an undisputable impact on the design of transformation in Hungary, where, in the capacity of finance minister, he managed to drive the Hungarian economy back on the road of sustainability. His influence has been felt in several other Central and Eastern European countries as well. Bokros also acted as director at the World Bank and currently he is a member of the Euro- pean Parliament and professor at Central European University (Budapest). When John Williamson (1994) invented the term “technopol”, he most probably had in mind individuals such as Bokros (along with the late Russian Jegor Gaidar or the Polish Leszek Balczerowicz). The subtitle of the volume under review (Economics and culture of transition in Mitteleuropa, the Baltic and the Balkan area) promises more (much more in- deed) than a pure macroeconomic analysis of the transition process of the last 20–25 years. It has not been without precedents that Lajos Bokros put his crys- tal-clear and painstaking economic analysis into a wider moral and philosophical perspective. In this book, however, he explicitly and directly focuses his attention on the cultural and moral determinants of the process of transition. One of the main messages of the volume is that neither the big picture of economic transfor- 1588-9726/$20.00 © 2013 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest 264 BOOK REVIEWS mation, nor its everyday reality can be fully understood without the correct inter- pretation of the wider political and social context. It is exactly the fundamental role of culture that explains why Bokros decided to refrain from using the culture-neutral term of Central and Eastern Europe, which, in fact, is nothing more than a mere geographical reference point (p. 4) and places the subject of his study instead to Mitteleuropa, the Baltics and the Balkans. To cite Bokros himself: “one of the most important objectives of this book is to put the history of recent economic and societal transformation into the context of regional culture and civiliza- tion because that is the best way to understand its course, motivations, successes and failures as well as its implications for the future” (p. 3). The apropos of the volume is twofold. On the one hand, more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, transition may seem to be “remote and unimpor- tant” (p. ix); yet, the current global economic and financial crisis induced countries all over the world to engage in activities which can easily culminate in “financial and fiscal socialism” (p. ix). That is, capitalism has come “under serious threat; this time around [however] from within” (p. ix). On the other hand, transition itself has not yet been completed in CEE. Capitalism might have triumphed over communism, but the past is still with us and has survived in the form of au- thoritarian state capitalism (p. x). This new-born variety of capitalism, however, is governed by totally different rules and culture as its Western-style counterparts (p. 2). Capitalism is, in fact, only accidentally occidental… The volume is structured into three main parts. The first part is dedicated to a detailed and laborious theoretical analysis of the communist system. The bench- mark model in the book is the Stalinist system, which was more than a command economy; it was rather a command society (p. 10). The emphasis on society is ra- tionalised by the fact that totalitarian regimes exert a “total control ... of human life” (p. 10). The lack of freedom of choice and consumers’ autonomy receive a special emphasis throughout the whole book. One of the most important conclu- sions of the first part sheds light on why the communist regime necessarily failed: its theoretical model (its whole design) and its declared goals have never been consistent with each other. “On the one hand, it [the command economy] claimed to be a historical [...] formation superior to market capitalism in terms of growth-potential and its capacity to satisfy the material and cultural needs of society [...] On the other hand, it chose a seemingly ultramodern but in reality brutally antiquated and backward economic and societal model [...] which proved to be completely incompatible and inconsistent with the attainment of these solemn objectives” (p. 17). Following the discussion of the ideal-typical model of communism, Bokros elaborates on how the model worked in reality. The discussion starts with the early 20th century war communism and the era of the New Economic Policy, fol- Society and Economy 35 (2013).

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