Varieties of capitalism or variegated state capitalism? East Germany and Yugoslavia in comparative perspective

Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This essay is a contribution to comparative capitalism studies. We begin with a critique of the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ school, before presenting the ‘variegated’ alternative. We note difficulties of both schools in characterising statist challengers to the dominant market order. The rise of China has made this a pressing issue, one that raises questions: Is China capitalist, and since when? And how should one analyse the communist world, which has since the 1920s represented a substantial swathe of the global economy? We next present an account of capitalism that explains étatiste variants as the product of late development, and the ‘communist’ economies as a state-capitalist model geared to catch-up industrialisation. This obliges us to consider how to account for their differences. In the second half we take up this challenge, via comparative analysis of two state-capitalist economies: the GDR (representing the orthodox Soviet model) and Yugoslavia (a maverick, market-friendly variant).