The Political Economy of National-Neoliberalism (original) (raw)

Has a post-neoliberal policy regime emerged from the the challenges to neoliberalism that accompanied the rise of nationalism and populism in some Eastern and Central European countries? Why has the political organization of these challenges to neoliberalism endured in some countries but not in others? By drawing on a mix of primary and secondary sources culled from the institutional, political and economic realities of Hungary and Romania, this paper suggests makes two claims. First, in these challenges amounted to a distinctive variety of neoliberalism: "national-neoliberalism." At its core one finds the slightly modified old goals of neoliberal orthodoxy embedded in a protective cocoon of orthodox and unorthodox policy instruments. The second claim of the paper is that the political organization national-neoliberal project was resilient in Hungary but not in Romania not only because the "national" elements of national-neoliberalism had protections against the bond markets, but also because the proponents of this project could manage a broader social bloc and deployed techno-political capabilities that bolstered their political power relative to that of challengers and buffered the impact of external structural forces. As such, the paper rejects the hypothesis about a nationalist-heterodox successor to neoliberalism and provides a comprehensive theory of policy resilience for nationalneoliberalism.