2009 Headlines
Elena Iankova discusses capitalism and its future in Europe
Serves as keynote at conference commemorating 20th anniversary Berlin Wall's collapse
November 3, 2009 | Ithaca, NY | Given her expertise on emerging varieties of capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and her published books Eastern Capitalism in the Making, Business, Government, and EU Accession: Strategic Partnership and Conflict, Elena Iankova was invited to be a keynote speaker at the recent Collaborative Research Center 580, a conference to commemorate the Twentieth Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.
Iankova addressed whether we can still speak about a distinct, CEE variant of capitalism with common features across the region, or whether the region has already reached a generalized form of capitalism that is similar to one of the major variants of capitalism established in the developed world (coordinated capitalism as in Germany and continental Europe versus non-coordinated, neo-liberal capitalism as in the United States).
She was also asked to critically assess the role of existing theoretical paradigms and approaches that have been used to analyze change and types of capitalism in CEE, and to speculate about the need for a distinguished theory of capitalism in CEE.
Participants in the conference were researchers and scholars from Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, England, and France. The event was held at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, on October 29 and 30, and co-sponsored by same, the University of Osnabruck, the London School of Economics and the Otto-Brenner Foundation in Germany.
The Collaborative Research Center 580 "Social Developments after Structural Change: Discontinuity, Tradition, and Structural Formation" was established in 2001 at the Universities of Jena and Halle in Germany and focuses on the long-term consequences of the political change of 1989/90 in East Germany and other former socialist societies. In 16 research projects, sociologists, political scientists, psychologists, historians, jurists, economists and health scientists study the challenges arising from the structural change in the economic, political and social sector of the former communist countries.
