The Political Economy of State-Society Relations in Hungary and Poland: Conclusion: Despotism, Discovery, and Surprise

No puzzle draws greater attention from social scientists than radical change in entrenched political and economic systems. The fascination is understandable. Issues of power, justice, and the conception of progress itself are implicated in large-scale, complex shifts such as the industrialization of agrarian societies and the development of capitalism. This is also the case with one of the great surprises of our time – the systemic transformation of state-socialist planned economies. In the early 1980s, few foresaw that by decade's end the very ideology and institutions of state socialism would be exposed as brittle shells. Fewer still foresaw that a mere twenty years later, most of the nations of eastern Europe – trapped since the end of World War II within a bloc meant to isolate them from the West – would be entering a union of thoroughly western Europeans. This book has addressed the surprise itself, but has concentrated on the long transformation that preceded the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the legacies that to this day shape the new capitalist democracies of two very different transformational leaders: Poland and Hungary. In so doing, the book sheds light on the political economy of state socialism and post-socialism and on existing theories of marketization and democratization. The book is also relevant to our current understanding of vast structural change and, more particularly, to long-standing debates on the relationship between agency and structure – a relationship best analyzed by focusing on what I have called points of permeable contact between state and society.