ABSTRACT
The main aim of this chapter is to shed new empirical light on the nature and most salient features of post-communist capitalism in 11 new EU member countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE11) against the backdrop of Western European models of capitalism. To this end, we summarize the empirical results of the subspace clustering exercise conducted in Chapters 4 through 9. Simultaneously, we pursue four specific objectives: (1) to identify the current models of Western European capitalism co-existing in the European Union and to confront the results with the original typology developed by Amable (2003); (2) to verify the hypothesis that CEE11 countries have formed their own model(s) of post-communist capitalism distinct from the patterns established in Western Europe; (3) to explain the evolution of post-communist capitalism in CEE11 economies between 2005 and 2014, and to check if their institutional architectures were subject to convergence or divergence trends vis-à-vis Western European models; and (4) to put forward and substantiate the proposal of using the notion of “patchwork capitalism” as the most adequate term that denotes the unique nature and most salient features of the model of capitalism that has emerged in CEE11 countries.
The empirical results of subspace clustering corroborate most of our starting conjectures. In particular, they (1) confirm the co-existence of diverse models of capitalism in the European Union; (2) show that the number and composition of particular clusters identified differ from the Amablean benchmarks, dubbed the Anglo-Saxon, Continental European, Nordic and Mediterranean models of capitalism; (3) prove that CEE11 countries developed their own distinct model of capitalism, compared to Western European benchmarks; and (4) imply that this model exhibits in many respects a patchwork nature. This is due to the institutional ambiguity and strong element of heterogeneity inherent to its design.
