The Political Economy of National-Neoliberalism (original) (raw)
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Socio-Economic Review
This article offers a new conceptual framework to analyze the national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in foreign-investment-dependent economies. By extending the emerging literature on the mutation of neoliberalism, the article challenges the conventional view of populism as a revolt against liberal capitalism and businesses. Following theory-testing process tracing, the article substantiates this theoretical framework through a detailed mixed-method study of the strategic test case of Viktor Orbán's Hungary. Utilizing new empirical material on businesses and policymakers, the article shows how the polarization of the business class rooted in global dependency structures, in interaction with a rising group of nationalist technocrats, has contributed to the national-populist mutation of neoliberalism. Nationalpopulist neoliberalism entails a new power bloc, a new compromise between national and transnational capital. It has preserved the core tenets of neoliberalism while modifying some of its peripheral elements and cutting back on avant-garde excesses to ensure the political viability of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union
The SAGE Handbook of Neoliberalism, 2018
This chapter explores the evolution of neoliberalism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It examines the nature of the transition from ‘communism’, and assesses the degree to which neoliberal ideas and policies were imported ‘from the West’ rather than developing out of a process of East-West interchange. ‘Proto-neoliberal’ ideas and social forces, it shows, were present in Eastern Europe and the former USSR prior to 1989. In the following decades, successive waves of neoliberal reforms were implemented by domestic elites, with the support of Western policymakers, business leaders and think-tanks as well as international organisations. As events since the 2008 crisis have demonstrated, the logic of the transformation was to open up the economies of the region to the exigencies of global capital, while restructuring and bolstering the power of domestic elites. The outcome has been growing disillusionment and public discontent with simplistic attempts to install a market economy and Western-style liberal democracy, as well as with the political forces, at home and abroad, that have pushed this process along. The capitalist triumphalism of the early 1990s has everywhere given way to the dystopian realities of an authoritarian, restrictive and reactionary mode of neoliberal capitalism.
The study captures how global neoliberalism has been localized starting from the end of the 2000s, acquiring particular relevance and significance in post-socialist Romania, newly integrated in the European Union. Moreover, it observes that especially from 2010, while neoliberalism has been constructed and justified as the political recipe or the alleged solution for economic crisis, it solidified as The takenfor-granted political economy of the country. The analysis goes through the presidential speeches between 2009 and 2011 that have transformed the provisions of the economic policy of the European Union, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in discursive justifications that made sense in Romanian context, most importantly framing them as the demand for reforming the state. Furthermore, the analysis descends into the contexts of two settlements from Romania to show how local actors translate/produce the neoliberal model of development, and how they articulate visions of neoliberal entrepreneurial competition and culture in local development programs. Eventually the paper observes how nowadays in Romania too, neoliberal governance reinvents itself by transferring the social role of the state to 'local communities' and demands from them competitiveness in the vein of a "community-led local development" paradigm, which is a new tool of neoliberal governmentality that re-creates the relationship between the citizen and the state.
2014
The completion of this research project would not have been possible without the support of many to whom I would like to express my gratitude. To begin with, I would like to thank Gareth Dale, my first supervisor, whose continuous encouragement, critical insights, and patience, has been invaluable throughout this period. I am also grateful to Peter Thomas, my second supervisor, whose comments and suggestions have been very helpful in improving the drafts of several chapters. In editing and revising previous chapters of this thesis, I was also fortunate to draw on comments and insights from Alexander Anievas,
Usurping Social Policy: Neoliberalism and Economic Governance in Hungary*
Journal of Social …, 2006
This paper takes issue with arguments emanating from the global social policy literature that neoliberal policy agendas have been largely a consequence of the interplay of international agencies with indigenous reform interests. While relevant, such arguments grasp only ...
The Neoliberalism as a Legal Project in State Socialist Hungary
2023
In this paper, it has been argued that an inevitable factor in the spread and hegemony of neoliberalism is the transformation of the legal system, and more specifically the restructure of law in line with neoliberalism. In the first part of the paper, which sets out the theoretical framework, I will explain how capitalism and the legal system are interconnected, since the legal system reflects the interests of the ruling classes of the time. I apply the theoretical frameworks to the Kádár regime in part two, where I examine its gradual neoliberalization in the context of the legal system. State socialist regimes have become a kind of "laboratory of the East" for neoliberalism, which is not to say that neoliberalism came from the West as some kind of "conquering" ideology, but rather that it has its roots in a transnational network of Western and Eastern
Conclusions: Post-communism, Neoliberalism and Populism in the Semi-Periphery
Law, Populism and the Political in Central and Eastern Europe, 2024
The wave of revolution in the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that began in 1989 resulted in the rejection of actually existing socialism, widely perceived as oppressive, and its replacement with neoliberalism. Despite democratic rhetoric, in matters of political decision making, neoliberalism has been decidedly undemocratic relying on "experts" implementing the "objective laws of economics." On the wave of democratisation, the neoliberal ideology supported by a relatively small percentage of society became hegemonic. Although the sense of democratisation was widespread, lawmaking was not based on the realisation of social preferences. On the contrary, it was legislative processes that shaped the society's axiological preferences. The neoliberal bias concerned not only economic policy and legislation, but also judicial decisions. The CEE variant of conservative-social populism can be described as a reaction to the neoliberal hegemony but it must be kept in mind that the semi-peripheral CEE region remains different from the West on various accounts. The problems here are sometimes rooted in Western concepts, (failed) legal transplants, and local reflections of Western disputes. However, even if they are imported, they take very specific forms that require both specific tests and diagnoses as well as original, region-specific solutions.
Neoliberalism in Translation: Economic Ideas and Reforms in Spain and Romania
Most political economists studying the global spread of neoliberalism have seen it as a form of policy diffusion. Recently constructivist political economists have pointed to the important role of the spread of neoliberal economic ideas in this process. However, they have not provided a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanisms through which neoliberal ideas travel across national policy spheres.