How shall we assess the reform projects in our three East Central European cases? One obvious method would be to adopt the perspective of the reigning liberal orthodoxy. As we saw in the previous chapter, each of our national cases departed dramatically from neoliberal policy prescriptions. Despite their protest that they never swerved from the commitment to “privatize first, reorganize later,” the managers of the German Treuhandanstalt, in fact, became involved in deliberative forums in which networks of shareholders and stakeholders restructured assets prior to privatization. Czech policy makers made even more radical departures. Although from ideological pronouncements alone we might have predicted that they would follow Adam Smith's prescriptions to “destroy the combinations,” in fact they acknowledged network properties - adopting antibankruptcy policies and job creation measures while giving priority to restructuring over price liberalization. Their privatization measures were unorthodox not simply because they developed the novel (and, at the time, still untested) voucher formula but because they resulted in new combinatory property forms with dense networks of interorganizational ownership. And what could be more unorthodox than the radical swings from market shock to paternalistic state and back again that characterize Hungarian policy?

An alternative method of assessing these reform projects is not to apply some external yardstick but to use the comparative analytic strategy we have adopted throughout this book. The most striking comparative difference in our cases is the degree of policy coherence, ranging from relative stability in principles and practices to almost frantic swings from one policy course to another. Once they recognized that mercilous exposure to market competition had transformed assets into liabilities, German policy makers established new restructuring institutions while persisting on a course of rapid privatization. Czech policy makers were even more coherent — avoiding tidal waves of bankruptcy from the first. In effect, Klaus and his colleagues rejected speed as a guiding principle, for the pace of change alone could be no guarantor of coherence. Instead, they operated with relatively clear selection criteria, believing that restructuring (always in the broad and loosely defined direction of privatization) should occur within frameworks that protected fixed assets, preserved human capital, and saved the network properties that reside in interorganizational ties. By these standards, Hungarian policy cannot be characterized as either consistent or coherent.