ABSTRACT
Theoretical interest in comparative capitalism (CC) and varieties of capitalism (VoC) is
not new (for a wide-ranging survey, see Bruff and Ebenau 2014). Most work in this area
focuses on categorizing and/or comparing individual cases, types or VoC at local,
regional, or national level and largely neglects their structural coupling and dynamic
entanglements. The alternative approach developed below proposes instead to analyse the
variegated nature of capitalist ‘space economies’ (on ‘space economies’, see Sheppard
and Barnes 1990). Variegation involves complementarities and tensions among types
(varieties) of capitalism in a tendentially singular, yet still incomplete and unevenly
integrated, world economy. These complementarities and tensions set limits to the
coexistence and co-evolution of varieties within a given space-time envelope marked by
specific combinations of spaces of places and flows and of economic cycles and other
temporalities. One can then examine whether the interaction of ‘compossible’ VoC in a
more or less complex space economy has benign, neutral, or negative effects on their
individual and joint economic performance. This more ‘ecological’ approach posits that
zones of relative stability in a given space economy are typically linked to instabilities
elsewhere and/or in the future that derive from differential abilities to displace and/or defer
problems, conflicts, contradictions and crisis tendencies. Such differences are related
in part to ‘vertical’ relations between core and periphery (Radice 2000) and to other
non-trivial asymmetric capacities to shape the world market. These factors get missed in
‘horizontal’ comparisons of local, national or regional varieties (Jessop 2012). These
asymmetries involve more than relative economic efficiency in the allocation of scarce
resources to competing uses. For, alongside the market’s sometimes not so invisible hand,
differential accumulation also depends on the actual or potential exercise of soft power,
force and domination. Two examples of asymmetrically interconnected economic spaces
that can be studied in terms of variegated capitalism are the pathological co-dependence of
the USA and China in a world market context and the increasingly dysfunctional
interaction of the neo-mercantilist Modell Deutschland and the rest of the Eurozone,
especially southern Europe (for details, see Becker and Ja
¨
ger 2012; Weeks 2014).
