The Capitalist Culture of Eastern Europe

This chapter tries to capture the capitalist philosophy of Eastern Europe, always ”in between”, exhibiting a vocation for swaying, for oscillation between the choices of progress and looking back. Eastern countries wanted to keep only the gentle hand of the state, keeping in check the tough one whilst hoping for the tenacity of the least visible one. We will emphasise that the coordinating force of the invisible hand loses the vitality described by Smith in the absence of clear and respected rules of property, and the appropriate political institutions. The market is infused in the East with local DNA. In a culture where the reminiscences of the unfulfilled promise of well-being for all persist, the profit and the entrepreneurs who pursue it are rather subjects of public anathema, and domestic capital constitutes, in a far too limited extent, a source of economic growth. We aim to shape the image of the Eastern capitalism as a socio-economic puzzle in which institutions are pieces that do not mix in the most harmonious way, those imported in recent decades, more durable or more fragile, having to coexist with fragments of pieces whose sanding has not ended yet, or even with some rusted ones.