AJS Volume 108 Number 1 (July 2002): 129–167 129  2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0002-9602/2002/10801-0004$10.00 The State, International Agencies, and Property Transformation in Postcommunist Hungary 1 Eric Hanley University of Kansas Lawrence King Yale University Istva ´n To ´th Ja ´ nos Hungarian Academy of Sciences This article challenges evolutionary accounts of property transfor- mation in postcommunist Hungary, which hold that novel property forms based on interenterprise ownership have emerged in that country. It shows that private property has emerged as the predom- inant category of ownership in Hungary and explains the rapid diffusion of private ownership by focusing on the actions of the state and international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. Following the collapse of communism, state actors in Hungary promoted the domestic accumulation of capital by subsidizing the sale of state enterprises to private parties, particularly enterprise insiders. Pressures from international agen- cies ultimately forced government officials to abandon this policy, however, and to conform to a neoliberal model of the state that allowed direct foreign investment. The conclusion considers the ca- pacity of states to intervene in economic processes in an environment increasingly dominated by suprastate agencies. Among sociologists studying Eastern Europe there has been a marked reluctance to label economic change in the region as a “transition to 1 This research was supported by a grant from the General Research Fund at the University of Kansas. The authors thank Robert Antonio, David N. Smith, David Stark, and Ivan Szele ´nyi for comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Please address all correspondence to Eric Hanley, Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 716 Fraser Hall, Lawrence, Kansas 66045. E-mail: hanley@ku.edu