This essay asks whether Poland's populism is evidence of a countermovement to European neoliberal political economy. The electoral success of PiS's 500+ child benefit policy appears to indicate that ...state intervention in the form of solidarism is a legitimate response to neoliberalism. The essay argues against this. Taking domification (drawing on the Polish word for home, indicating a shift to greater social solidarism) as a starting point of analysis, it interprets 500+ as a way to co-opt particular social forces to accept the promotion of neoliberal competitiveness in Poland. What at first appears to be a progressive alternative is, in reality, a contribution to further commodification of the reach of capital enabling the reproduction of neoliberalism.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article asks why Poland’s populist Prawo i Sprawiedliwości Law and Justice government promotes progressive forms of social reproduction in the context of the supposed crisis of neoliberalism. It ...illustrates how populism is a response to the ongoing social ambiguity of post-communist transition that redefines and recombines existing and novel political and social resources that are built both on and with existing social arrangements in Poland. It achieves this by analysing the current government’s flagship child benefit programme: 500Plus. The article claims that certain gender norms construct hegemonic neoliberal and populist discourses that legitimise particular policies, illustrating this by bringing into dialogue Janine Brodie’s neoliberal ‘paradox of necessity’, with the notion of ‘fail forwards’ neoliberalisation. The 500Plus policy remains ridden with contradiction, on one hand a potentially progressive intervention in social reproduction that deals with the crisis mode of society but that simultaneously helps ensure the continuation of neoliberalisation.
The paper asks what role the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) plays in coordinating policy reform in post-crisis Eastern Central Europe (ECE). How did the EBRD attempt to ...mitigate the effects of the crisis and what role did the institution play in the configuration of a post-crisis European political economy? The paper analyses the content of the annual EBRD Transition Reports (TR) as representation of thinking in the EBRD Chief Economist's Office on the salient concerns relevant to its region of operations. The paper analyses TRs from 2007 to 2013 assessing the discursive shifts inside the EBRD establishing (1) how the TRs frame whether the region is in crisis, (2) apportioning censure for causing crisis and (3) how the EBRD TRs delineate the development of appropriate policy responses to the crisis. In conclusion the paper situates these processes as evidence of a further iteration of 'fail forwards' neoliberalization.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is an institution, a set of programmes and policies designed to mark a number of important reforms not just in the post-Soviet space but in the ...wider European political economy. It is committed to developing a competitive business environment, foreign investment and private sector activity in the post-communist space. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is considered to be a key inter-state mechanism enabling member states to negotiate post-communist reforms. The paper reorients analysis of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, claiming that existing framings of the role of the EBRD ignore its tangible neoliberalising pressures. It argues that the EBRD works to fundamentally restructure states in the post-communist space in three ways: (1) the configuration of an ‘appropriately’ neoliberal economic space, (2) the construction of subaltern subjectivities in the regional space, and (3) the persistent dominance of expert knowledge and policy practice external to the state. This restructuring is intended to further neoliberalism in the economic space of the region. By uncoupling the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development from a state centric analysis, the paper reveals how the technical aspects of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development activities configure particular neoliberal rationalities and competencies not as a putative superstate, but as a key site for the ever-deeper encroachment of neoliberalisation in peripheral European states.
JEL Codes: P390, F550
This article asks whether there is a discrepancy between the field of International Political Economy (IPE) as we know it from recent debates about its role, distinctiveness, and contribution ...compared to the experience of its practitioners on the ground? Intellectually IPE is needed more than ever to engage real world events but faces constraining institutional imperatives. We have two interrelated objectives related to this: (1) to assess the extent to which the patterns in recent interventions are replicated when you ask those who self-identify as IPE scholars in the UK (2) to appraise survey data on the reproduction of a particular community of practice within the field as it evolves intellectually and institutionally. Rather than imposing our interpretation of IPE through publications, citation practices, conference attendance, or textbook content we offer two distinct contributions. First, to report new empirical data on IPE as a ‘field of inquiry’ in UK universities; and, second, to develop a critical intervention on the indisciplined nature of IPE as a field of inquiry in the UK. We conclude that the widely acknowledged and long-standing fertile intellectual advantages of IPE's ‘open range’, unlimited intellectual borders and transgressive enquiry bring institutional disadvantages with them.
This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes ...associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist.
This article interrogates the social impact of neoliberalisation and the counter-hegemonic forces this has engendered by exploring Poland's recent populist turn. It rejects methodologically ...nationalist attempts to isolate events in Poland from wider processes of structural change and the accompanying realignment within the global capitalist economy, analysing the implications of a number of alternative and counter-hegemonic projects to the neoliberal mainstream. The article considers whether the populist turn signals a decisive rejection of neoliberalism, despite the absence of a coherent left alternative and the fact that the anti-neoliberal alternative has come from the nationalist right, dominated by politically regressive conservative social forces who have aimed to arrest welfare cuts and end the austerity associated with Poland's seemingly endless forms of reform. While no clear anti-neoliberal strategy exists, pragmatic responses have occurred but within the structurally delimited environs of state intervention. Utilising a Gramscian critical political economy the article shows how populist counter-hegemonic forces have been co-opted and are best understood in terms of the relationship to specific conjunctural projects for the reorientation of the reproduction of capitalist social relations. The conclusion reflects on the potential for a progressive politics of a renewed Polish left to emerge.
In this article, we explore the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's (EBRD's) place in the gendered political economy of Eastern Central Europe's post-communist transition. We document ...the gendered modalities surrounding the EBRD's policy strategies for post-communist transition, suggesting that they help to naturalise certain gendered constructions of neoliberal development and market-building. To elaborate these claims we show first, how the EBRD largely ignored gender until the 'global financial crisis' when it discovered gender mainstreaming by mobilising the Gender Action Plan (GAP); and then second, how the 2013 revision of the GAP, the Strategic Gender Initiative extended the EBRD's gender aware activities. Both policies illustrate how the EBRD's understanding and application of gender fit firmly within a neoliberal framework promoting transition as a form of modernisation where gender inequality is always posited as external to the market and reproduces uneven and exploitative social relations.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The article proposes a Gramscian account of Poland's transition to a market economy. It considers what has generated, sustained, and legitimated neoliberal hegemony and illustrates how neoliberal ...ideas attained a hegemonic position through the development of a particular class and national state project. It uncovers where the agents of this process are visible by contrasting two waves of post-communist reform that have contributed to the reconfiguration of the Polish political economy in the current conjuncture of global restructuring. Firstly, it focuses on the centrepiece of neoliberal efforts to constitute hegemony in the shape of the "shock therapy" reform programme and then on the later application of a highly selective form of Europeanisation. Finally the article considers which social forces have offered the most effective resistance to neoliberalism in an appraisal of the recent populist turn in Polish politics.
*Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the CEEISA/ISA International Convention, Budapest, Central European University, 26-28 June 2003 and a workshop on Nation and Region: Reconciling Nation-Building and Supranational Integration at the European Policy and Research Unit at the University of Manchester, 9 March 2007. I am also indebted to Dorothee Bohle, Paul Cammack, Greig Charnock, Randall Germain, David Makarenko-Smith, Inderjeet Parmar, Hugo Radice, Geoffrey Underhill, Heloise Weber and the two referees for their comments, interventions and advice on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as the patience of the editors of Global Society.
Beyond the rather politically anaemic studies of the influence of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and similar studies on the democratisation and conditionality during negotiations for ...Eastern Central European nations to join the European Union, there has been an almost uniform acceptance that the genuine causes of transition are internal and that international factors played, at most, only supportive roles in advancing business-oriented reforms. When EU membership negotiations created a notable improvement in the business environment for investors in ECE during the late 1990s, many Europeanists assumed that the baton of "reform" had been passed from the institutions of the Washington consensus to those of the EU. The aim of this article is to offer a corrective to such myopic analyses and to begin consciously interrogating the impact of so-called globalisation in the ECE political economy. Adapted from the source document.
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