| Focussing on the development of the Russian banking system since the collapse of the Soviet Union, this thesis shows how historically embedded domestic political cultures and institutional systems constrain adaptation to international economic standards and practices. The thesis synthesizes two political paradigms---New Institutionalism and International Political Economy---to argue that every nation must reconcile internationally accepted norms with its own distinctive national institutional legacy. Specifically, it shows that the development of an "internationally compliant" market-based Russian banking system has been limited by a national legacy of corruption, disrespect for law, absence of a legal and cultural infrastructure of property rights, historical webs of persistent connection and influence between state and business, and an associated pattern of reliance on political patronage and rent-seeking fundamentally incompatible with international norms of market competition.; Methodologically, the thesis draws on historical records, specialized Russian and Polish business and banking journals, and interviews with Russian and Polish bankers and government officials. The methodology benefited from an access to Russian-language historical and specialized business and political journals which have not been widely accessible to English-speaking scholars.; The findings of the thesis suggest that Russia's historical legacy has deeply compromised its ability to adapt to international norms of finance. They show that the historic absence of a system of legal and property rights as well as entrenched cultural patterns of statism, rent-seeking and political patronage stalled and partially reversed an initial promising shift toward creation of a new model of market-based Russian finance. Drawing on a comparison with Polish experience, the thesis concludes that students of internationalization must rely on New Institutionalist analysis and the historical political legacy of each nation to understand fully the distinctive transitional path toward internationalization. |
