During the 1980s, in the final years of communism, Eastern European economists and politicians were easily persuaded by the myth that removal of the petty restrictions on private business would allow private enterprise to flourish. The idea of a permanent state of capitalist dynamism is rooted in the notion that finance spontaneously backs industrial enterprise. Many economists assume, at least in their abstract theories More
Since the beginning of the debate about Europeanization and Globalization we experience an overweight of analyses in Political Economy and about transnational corporations in particular, without paying the same categorical attention to understand processes and dynamic’s on the side of labour. Concerning Europe, some authors even state that we experience the development of a transnational European capitalist class. More
The politico-economic relationship between Germany and the Balkan states was, from the end of the nineteenth century, one of unequal interdependence. The strategic value of the Balkan states for an export-dependent and resourcedependent industrial state like Germany was manifest in the Berlin–Bagdhad railway project, two world wars and the close relationship with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The region’s value to Germany’s economic and political elites has been manifest more recently in the wake of Yugoslavia’s disintegration More
The “great capitalist transformation” in the East was characterized by general
forced “privatisations” in a very opaque and unprecedented context. It had to
radically transform the role of money and markets in the whole economy to
permit capital accumulation while getting rid of the existing forms of social
protection and income within the big factories—the core of the bureaucratic
system of production and distribution. More
The current post should show that the terms “core” and “periphery” have to be regarded in relation to an “imperial division of labour”. The term has been specifically introduced and elaborated by the Hungarian historian Ivan Berend. We have taken it from his book “History Derailed. Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century” (2003), which we make use of, including quotes from it. More
In our previous “ papers from the organizers” we have highlighted the term and the issue of “regions”, and have explained some additional terms and their connections. Furthermore, we have promised to discuss the structural similarities referred to in the title. The following discussion paper is another draft for further debate – it continues the previous paper sand remains a rough sketch for the time being. More
Organization: Center for Labour Studies – CRS, Zagreb, Croatia
Website: http://radnickistudiji.org/
Project title: “Two decades after the end of socialism: European integration, the (new) international division of labor and shifting regimes of reproduction of labor power in the post-yugoslav context” More
Globalization is probably the most often used term in social sciences nowadays. Several colleagues, however, maintain that there is nothing new in globalization. The entire early modern and modern history were periods of permanent development of globalization, especially after the discoveries, building colonial empires, later railroads, and establishing laissez-fair system an the international gold standard. The world, no doubt about it, became more international, if you want global all the time. More
This article calls on the need for scholarly studies to compare and contrast the failure of neo-liberal policies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s in view of the sovereign debt crises in the periphery states of the EU today. It explores the way(s) in which “shock therapy” financial statecraft in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere did not alleviate the debt problem but, quite the opposite, augmented it. The international mechanism in operation in the past, as well as today, has not been and is not real development, modernisation More