Introduction

Some social scientists, such as those who organized the ISA Sociological Research Committee meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, in June 1992, have asked whether 1989 and after represent less a new departure than a convergence of East with West (Theory, 1991). Certainly the peoples of East-Central Europe do aspire to convergence in so far as they would like to establish liberal democracy and a capitalist market economy quickly. The character of the latter demand, however, is open to question; very many would like the prosperity of the West and the job security of the East. Be that as it may, the convergence theory of Kerr, Aron and others in the 1960s was not about aspirations but rather a common logic of development in industrial societies which gave rise to social structures much more comparable than the ideological apologists for capitalism and socialism would lead one to expect (Kerr et al., 1960; Aron, 1967). There are two obvious reasons why returning to this idea now is inappropriate. First, what we have witnessed in the societies of East-Central Europe before and after 1989 is not some internal developmental dynamic which slowly compelled their convergence with capitalist societies in Western Europe or North America to a point at which continued protestations of a different ideology became insupportable. Rather, what we have seen is the exhaustion of the developmental potential of the state socialist mode of production, and the inability of communist party-states to resist demands for transformative change. In terms of technology, economic development and occupational structure, the societies of EastCentral Europe had been diverging from the range of capitalist formations in the West at least since the mid-1970s. For all the talk of a return to Europe (and all the attachments of youth to American cultural icons), the onerous legacy of real socialism may well preclude convergence on some dimensions for the foreseeable future. Second, convergence theory is inattentive to differences, many of them immense, within capitalism. (The same might be said of much of the discourse of capitalism versus socialism which succeeded it in the late 1960s and 1970s.) If one considers equity

structures, the role of stock exchanges, the role of banks and relations between finance and industrial capital, the role of the state, industrial relations and the segmentation of labour markets, state and private welfare provision, non-tariff barriers to trade, corruption and connections with organized crime, and the social relations and cultural forms which accompany them, then American, British, German, Italian, Swiss, Swedish and Japaneseand Taiwanese, Brazilian and Kenyan-capitalisms are each very different. With which of these is it supposed East-Central Europe is converging or could converge?