Wade Jacoby Livres

Following World War II, a poorly funded, piecemeal effort to transfer British and American institutions into West Germany resulted in many positive changes for that nation's citizens. After reunification, however, a more ambitious, well-funded, and systematic effort to establish West German institutions in the former GDR has been less effective. Through a close analysis of these two cases, Wade Jacoby explores the conditions under which one society can serve as a model for the reshaping of another. In the initial transfer, Jacoby finds, Allied occupying forces sought to build institutions in Germany that were the functional equivalents of ones they valued at home. They encouraged the development of selected German organizations that became co-architects of the postwar society. Several decades later, by contrast, policymakers in Bonn used exact rather than functional imitation, and they ignored regional interests when redesigning East German society. For both cases, Jacoby focuses on attempts to reform industrial relations and secondary education. For innovations to be "pulled in" from abroad, Jacoby argues, local civic groups must participate in and benefit from the institution-building process. In addition, the state imposing the transfer must have a flexible strategy. By looking at international examples, Jacoby provides further evidence that political imitation is at heart a process of coalition building.

In 2004 the European Union and NATO each added ten new member states, most from the post-communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. In order to prepare for membership, these countries had to make many thousands of institutional and legal adjustments. Indeed, they often tried to modernize in just a few years, implementing practices that evolved over many decades in Western Europe. This book emphasizes the way that policy elites in Central and Eastern Europe often 'ordered from the menu' of established Western practices. When did this emulation of Western practices succeed and when did it result in a fiasco? Professor Jacoby examines empirical cases in agriculture, regional policy, consumer protection, health care, civilian control of the military, and military professionalism from Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine. The book addresses debates in institutionalist theory, including conditionality, Europeanization, and external influences on democratic and market transitions.