"Vanhuysse is clearly on to something with his main argument - that 'strategic social policies' explain the relative weakness of protest politics in Eastern Europe. He identifies a governing strategy of 'divide and pacify', by which the workers who were most likely to unite in protest were instead turned against one another in a contest for limited economic resources. He shows how policies promoting early retirement enabled post-communist governments to remove older workers with with more protest experience and more social ties from the traditional arenas of state-labor contestation. The book makes an important connection between the strategic allocation of welfare benefits and political consolidation of liberal market democracy - something you do not hear much about from the neo-liberals, who like to take credit for east-central Europe's historic transformation"
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