Models of Dirigisme in East Asia: Perspectives for Eastern Europe

Abstract

The underlying causes of the meltdown of the command economies have renewed the discussion of what politico-economic strategy post-socialist societies should choose. The systemic breakdown was the result of an interaction of several factors, endogenous and exogenous. The idea that collapsed at the close of the 1980s was a defeat for central planning, bureaucratization, paternalism, state ownership and the belief in the ability of the polity to solve problems related to all spheres of society. It is not uninteresting to note that, in the West, the legitimacy and trust in the state as the principal problem-solving institution and mediator of social contradictions was challenged as early as 1968. There is a certain similarity of fate for both the overloaded and overexposed state in Western capitalist societies and the Eastern socialist countries. In recent years, under the combined pressures of the neo-liberal right and new social movements — for different reasons, of course — the capitalist state has been gradually weakened. In the East, once the regimes were no longer propped up by the Soviet hegemon, an implosion of the socialist states took place (Kaldor, 1991, 28).