Diverse Convergence : Institutional Continuity and Economic Reform in Contemporary France and Germany
The financial crisis of 2008-2009 stands as a crucial litmus test of the robustness and performance of the varieties-of-capitalism thesis, which stipulates that national models of capitalism are distinguishable from one another by particular sets of political-economic institutions, resulting in varying patterns of economic development, social outcomes, and forms of political behavior. Yet it might be argued that this crisis marks the culmination of a more protracted empirical examination of this thesis, particularly as concerns the central analytical distinction it drawns between the coordinated or statist economies of continental Europe and Japan on the one hand, and the liberal Anglo-Saxon economies on the other. The proposition that the anemic performance of the former would continue to be offset by the greater economic security and equality they provide their societies thanks to the non-market institutions of economic regulation they have evolved has come under serious challenge over the past two decades. Indeed, far from protecting their populations from the impacts of the market, the coordinated-statist economies have in fact undergone a creeping process of liberalization under the veneer of their institutional distinctiveness which belies their continued ability to safeguard the imperatives of security and equity in the face of intensifying globalization. From this perspective, rather than signaling the beginning of the erosion of the varieties-of-capitalism consensus, the current global economic may in fact have marked its theoretical death knell