ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to explore the different tendencies developing in Anglo-American neo-liberalism as compared to the corporatism of the German-speaking world. Given German potential hegemony in western and eastern Europe, surely corporatism presents an alternative and significant model of accumulation. Corporatist regimes, like the Japanese paradigm, depend on a certain number of “flexible rigidities” in the achievement of economic growth. Corporatist regulation involves economic governance by an extremely dense web of institutions, of bodies that violate the assumptions of neo-classical economics as well as the realities of neo-liberal regulation. The anti-modern, “ancient regime” nature of a number of these institutions provides a set of rigidities that allows for flexible economic accumulation on the one hand, but has a set of retrogressive socio-cultural implications on the other. The chapter concludes with a number of observations relating first to the Anglo-American comparison, and second to the effects of re-unification in Germany.
