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The retreat of liberal democracy: authoritarian capitalism and the accumulative state in Hungary

Greece, or the post-colonial spaces of Malta and Cyprus. In this sense, the editor’s invocation of Ralf Dahrendorf was ill-advised. Dahrendorf had grave misgivings about interpreting the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc as the ultimate triumph of Western capitalism over Eastern socialism. “The counties of East Central Europe”, he wrote, “have not shed their Communist system in order to embrace the capitalist system (whatever that is); they have shed a closed system in order to create an open society, the open society to be exact, for while there can be many systems, there is only one open society” (Dahrendorf 2014, 40). The editors' analysis is not helped by the idiosyncratic use of “communism” as a synonym of “socialism”. The confusion is exaggerated when authors alternate between the two terms within the same chapter (264, 269), and even more so when they insist on the use of “social market economy” instead of “capitalism” (105). Surely if the GDR’s ruling party is taken to task for misrepresenting the market structure of Western Europe, it is incumbent upon its critics to adopt a terminological approach consistent with agreed-upon definitions. Despite these drawbacks, the volume should serve as a valuable reference for undergraduates and those with a general interest in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. Political scientists may find in the volume, a helpfully assembled pool of data for comparative analyses and a textbook Popperian analysis to share with their students. Geographers will benefit from an overview of how the relationship between center and periphery is redefined by the transition process. Overall, the volume achieves a fine balance in the discussion of the political, economic, and social factors conditioning post-socialist transition to democracy, as well as the interrelation between them. The editors set out to highlight similarities between the European trajectories of former Eastern Bloc countries, and they were largely successful. Along the way, they also demonstrated the systemic and persistent differences distinguishing these countries from “established” European democracies. Nonetheless, as the EU’s unified and committed response to the COVID pandemic shows, what unites Europe is stronger than what divides her.