Great Crisis or Permanent Crisis? Some reflections on a comparative periodisation of Austria and Uruguay

Geographically, Uruguay and Austria are far apart.Hence, why do we want to compare them?First of all, both are small states.This poses particular questions about the insertion into the wider regional and international economy and particular challenges to regulation, not in the least in the context of regional integration.Secondly, today the two countries share some socio-political similarities.Both have developed rather well entrenched conservative welfare states, (neo-)corporatist institutions, and clientelist forms of legitimisation.Furthermore, both countries are characterised by marked socio-economic and -political differences between the large capital city and the rest of the country.The question we want to investigate in this paper is whether there are similarities in the pattern of socio-economic and -political change and their periodisation.Thirdly, the conceptional framework of the regulationist approach which is our theoretical perspective was developed out of the experience of the post-war development of the big European economies.We deliberately apply this framework to different contexts: small states in centre and periphery and their long-term trajectory.Here, we strive to see whether the conceptual framework holds in these different contexts, too, or whether it requires some modification.In the tradition of political economy, the regulationist approach provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of long-term socio-economic and socio-political development of capitalism.Regulationists perceive capitalist development as a sequence of internationally different historical formations that evolve through crises and conflicts (Hirsch 1990: 17, Thret 1992: 189).The "great crises" are seen as the critical crossroads since it is here that the situation is politically more "open" (Fiori 1995, Aglietta 1987: 19).In situations of crisis, social actors are forced to abandon established norms of behaviour and to develop new strategies to deal with the crisis.Their strategies reflect different interests, different visions of the roots of crisis, and, thus, different options about the "correct" way to deal with the crisis.Therefore, strategies might clash quite manifestly.It might be that diverging strategies lead to long (or even permanent) social, economic and political instability (de Bernis 1983: 276).However, there does also exist the alternative