COMPARATIVE HISTORICAL CONFERENCE

Friday - April 21, 2006

The theme of this conference will be on institutional transfer, more specifically, the process of adoption of the core institutions of western society, a market economy and a liberal democracy, by non-western societies [as a consequence of either endogenous or exogenous processes]. The transferibility of institutions is not only one of the oldest themes in social science, but also one that has been at the center of the contemporary political agenda.

We will look into two questions:

Question #1
Is it possible, or feasible, to transfer these institutions to non-western settings, as some scholars and the neo-conservatives in the current U.S. government have been arguing?

Question #2
What happens when this transfer is attempted, i.e., in the case of democracy, voluntary adoption, as in Brazil, or coercive imposition, as in Iraq? What do you get: approximations to the originals, which in time may resemble these originals, or the institutionalization of something different, i.e., in the case of capitalism, crony or mafia capitalism, as in some countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia?

Obviously, there are different consequences in different societies. Capitalist institutions look very differently in Chile and Venezuela, and so do democratic institutions in Korea and Ukraine. And some societies, the Arab world in particular, seem to be immune to the diffusion of either market institutions or liberal democracy. There are many hypotheses that attempt to account for specific cases [institutional legacies, culture] but there is little in terms of a general theory of institutional transfer.

We would like to start a discussion on this issue. At the conference there will be panels dealing with the general questions, as well as the characteristics of market economies and/or liberal democracy in three regions of the world: East Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

There will be distinguished presenters, from UCSD and other universities. In the beginning of the spring quarter, we will distribute the program.