Legacies of industrialization and paths of transnational integration after socialism

Recent comparative research has established that once the socialist system fell apart, its pieces began to move on different trajectories that led to a variety of capitalist regimes. These regimes were characterized, among other features, by a patterned rather than random diversity of new industrial production and export profiles. Some postsocialist economies started to export what the West usually exports to the rest of the world: chemicals and machinery turned out by technologically advanced capital-intensive plants. Others set up a multitude of low-skill and low-wage sweatshops and specialized in exports of textiles, footwear, food, wood, and simple electronics assembly. A third group of countries integrated into the global economy via markets of natural resources: oil, gas, metals, or cotton (Bohle and Greskovits 2007). When tracing the links between the postsocialist varieties of capitalism and past industrialization, we are faced with puzzling questions. This diversity is surprising against the background that the new capitalisms’ point of departure – socialism – is widely seen as a system that had been remarkably successful in forcing uniform institutions and practices on the republics and satellite states of the Soviet Empire.