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Transitional Societies in Eastern Europe: Moving Beyond the Washington Consensus Paradigm in Transitology
Author(s) -
Kokushkin Maksim
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
sociology compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.782
H-Index - 31
ISSN - 1751-9020
DOI - 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00423.x
Subject(s) - communism , metaphor , argument (complex analysis) , transition (genetics) , soviet union , context (archaeology) , capitalism , sociology , political economy , political science , positive economics , epistemology , law , politics , geography , economics , philosophy , linguistics , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , gene
Post‐communist transitions are generally thought to be a part of the past. However, most students of those transitions now acknowledge that the processes of transition in the countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union are far from over. Instead of reaching a point where all countries converge towards normal capitalism, the experiences of the countries from the region are extremely diverse. This article surveys the literature on post‐communist transitions and argues that transitologists have experienced a shift from viewing transitions as mostly similar and converging to viewing transitions as uniquely complex and diverging. To advance this argument, the article: (i) systematizes the literature along methodological lines; (ii) uses a policy paradigm (namely, the Washington Consensus) as a metaphor to illustrate the tensions in the literature; and (iii) connects the shift away from one‐size‐fits‐all policies with the evolution in the literature from being formally prescriptive and abstract to being context‐sensitive and emphasizing complexity.