In this chapter, I contextualize the authoritarian systematization of the political field that made it so inaccessible to non-regime elites and newcomers. I argue that this context negatively influenced the established opposition and the regime elites on the eve of Nazarbayev’s resignation. None of them were ready to react to such drastic changes in the political field. As a result, the established opposition disintegrated following a number of scandals, and the remaining opposition politicians had to move to populist calls to sustain their potential electorate. Within Nazarbayev’s regime, the elites remained stagnant and disoriented; they focused too much on what was happening within the regime itself and did not manage to meet the growing societal discontent and protests. These conditions left newly elected president Tokayev in an uneasy situation where, on the one hand, he had to deal with continual crises; on the other hand, this type of intra-elite concentration within the regime offered a unique opportunity for new, unknown political forces to emerge in the public sphere. This is how the Kazakh Spring was born as an alternative political field of opportunities.

This chapter challenges the conventional chronology of the interwar era that distinguishes the conservative 1920s, when policy makers were preoccupied with the restoration of the pre-First World War liberal economic order, and the revolutionary 1930s, when they reacted to the global economic and financial crisis by pursuing isolationism, state interventionism, and trade blocs. Taking the example of Hungary’s monetary management in the 1920s, it shows that there was more continuity between the two decades than is usually recognized. Due to the dislocations arising in the wake of the war and subsequent peace arrangements, the fragmentation of empires into small ethnonationalist states, and revolutionary and counterrevolutionary political and social upheavals, institutional and policy adjustments in the direction of what was to become mainstream in the 1930s were already budding in the 1920s. The chapter provides empirical evidence of this sneaking nationalization in Hungary’s monetary management, manifest in a combination of adherence to the rules of the gold standard game, on the one hand, and capital-flow neutralization, on the other, depending on what was appropriate to stimulate or sustain domestic economic activity.

A constraint theory approach to creativity can conveniently be conceptualized in five different dimensions each of which captures some important way in which creativity is constrained. The five dimensions have been generated by the empirical patterns from comparing disciplines in the making. The first dimension is a list of the most important empirical types of constraints that emerge from theoretical sensitization of comparative data. All creative processes are constrained by physical constraints which was first noted by Hegel in his lectures on aesthetics and rediscovered be Elster. The important role of prototypes has been noticed by the art historian Ragnar Josephson and the literary theorist Johan Svedjedal. The role of knowledge constraints was noted by Randall Collins and elaborated by me. Rules of the game were discovered by Aristotle (theoretical, productive, practical knowledge) and rediscovered by Wittgenstein. Motivations have been at the core of sociopsychological and economic theories of creativity.

Well-functioning governments are at the basis of a modern, democratic society, the rule of law and a market process that generates trust, opportunities, prosperity and freedom. To maintain the economic success of advanced economies and the trust of our citizens, governments need to do well on their core tasks: setting sound rules of the game in the market economy and providing high-quality, essential public goods and services. These include security, education, infrastructure, basic social safety nets, the environment and sound public finances. Public expenditure is an important tool in this regard, but more spending is not correlated with more trust – ‘better’ spending and better performance on core tasks is. This chapter also sets out the map of the book: How public spending has evolved over time and how it has been financed in Part I; government performance and efficiency, the role of expenditure reforms and the ‘optimal’ size of government in Part II; the main fiscal risks in the social and financial sphere in Part III; and the case for strong rules and institutions to govern public spending and limit fiscal risks in the concluding Part IV.