This book series presents scientific and scholarly studies focusing on societies and political orders in transition, for example in Central and Eastern Europe but also elsewhere in the world. By comparing established societies, characterized by wellestablished market economies and well-functioning democracies, with post-socialist societies, often characterized by emerging markets and fragile political systems, the series identifies and analyzes factors influencing change and continuity in societies and political orders. These factors include state capacity to establish formal and informal rules, democratic institutions, forms of social structuration, political regimes, levels of corruption, specificity of political cultures, as well as types and orientation of political and economic elites.Societies and Political Orders in Transition welcomes monographs and edited volumes from a variety of disciplines and approaches, such as political and social sciences and economics, which are accessible to both academics and interested general readers.Topics may include, but are not limited to, democratization, regime change, changing social norms, migration, etc.

The paper is based upon a review of three new books devoted to the big emerging countries in Latin America and Asia. One of these books was written by the Russian scholar Lev Klochkovskii. The authorship of two other books belongs to Pierre Salama, a well-known French specialist in developing countries. The starting point for consideration of the mentioned works is the fact of convergence between the North and the South. This convergence involves quantitative economic indicators as well as qualitative aspects of development: the rise of innovations and R&D centres, enterprises outputting high-tech goods, etc. All these and some other trends require revision of old concepts of “centre” and “periphery” in the world system. However, the countries under consideration have entered the period of slowdown, and risk to fall into a middle income trap. It means that their development models have been exhausting and need to be profoundly changed. In the case of Latin American countries, the difficulties arisen recently are aggravated by the impact of China. The manufacturing industries in Brazil and Mexico loose competiveness under pressure of goods imported from China. It brings about a relative de-industrialisation of Latin American economies. At the same time, the recent development in China becomes increasingly resembling to the Brazilian situation of the 1970s when the economic growth was mostly advantageous for the upper, upper middle and, partly, middle classes. It led to the deepening of social differentiation and, thereby, restrained the internal market. This trend can be interpreted as “Latin Americanisation” of China. Can the big emerging countries change trajectories of their development? If not, they will appear as the colossi with feet of clay rather than the real centres of economic power.

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The paper deals with the problem of dependent development and conservative modernization in Latin America. Whereas external dependency has been the permanent feature of Latin American development since colonial times, conservative modernization can be treated as the essential effect of this development. Almost all significant reforms in Latin American countries began earlier than the own premises for them could mature, because they were the obliged responses to the external challenges and shocks the continent underwent. The social actors of those reforms were often interested in adaptation of the obsolete socioeconomic structures and relationships to the changed external conditions instead of their destruction and genuine social renewal. The cases of authoritarian modernizations in the Southern Cone countries in the 1960s–80s clearly illustrated such attempts of the ruling groups to go forward whilst looking back. The neoliberal reforms of the 1990s demonstrated, at first glance, continuation of this practice being a form of modernisation for the upper classes’ advantages. Meanwhile, as the author argues, these reforms were actually a “swan song” of conservative modernization in Latin America. The “left turn” of the next decade did not abolish external dependency of Latin American countries, but created some important premises for the rise of internally rooted impulses to endogenous development. The new social actors of this development, such as various NGOs and left-wing movements, began to emerge in Latin America. They propose own programmes of transition towards a knowledge-based, innovative economy. This phenomenon allows to suppose that some Latin American countries have real chances for technological breakthroughs in the future, and it will be the genuine deliverance from the model of a dependent, imitative development.