Frieder Otto Wolf: Reflections on the 1. Day

We have tried to address the problems posed by conceiving a modern left wing policy in Europe and in the EU, specifically reflecting its dynamic global context, and trying to reflect recent experiences adequately, while establishing a theoretical basis for a critical approach to them.
The task formulated by Judith Dellheim in the “Opening” had been to clarify the global context and the theoretical basis of the discussion. She had asked the workshop More

Kees van der Pijl: The United States and Europe—Bolstering the Infrastructure of Atlantic Unity in a Time of Crisis, Overcoming Rivalry

In these notes[1] I will address the issue of how the United States and the European Union are responding to what is now increasingly recognised as an existential crisis of Western hegemony and liberal capitalism. As George Soros wrote on 23 October 2014 in The Guardian newspaper, the West must keep up its pressure in Ukraine, because if not, the system that has been built up over decades and which includes NATO and the EU, may begin to unravel and as it does, eastern Europe may again come under the influence of a resurgent Russia. More

 

For the Workshop Discussion – Theses of the Speakers

The mainstream debate on core and periphery should not distract us from the really important questions on the causes and the causers of the crises and on how ruling policy deals with them. In this context we shall have to take note of the fact that the term “peripherisation” cannot adequately express the real challenges we face. More

Joachim Becker: Enlarging the EU Sphere of Influence Eastwards – Or: The Dialectics of Integration and Disintegration

In the face of the austerity-induced depression of the domestic markets in the EU, the EU and its main powers bank on the expansion of economic relations beyond the EU and free trade agreements. The coalition agreement of social democrats and Christian democrats in Germany, the dominant EU power, is characteristic of this thinking. It is extremely brief and unimaginative in its paragraphs on the EU, but dedicates detailed and highlighted paragraphs on the Germany’s economic relationship with so-called emerging economies and on EU free trade agreements More

Jan Toporowski: Eastern Europe: Post-Communist Assets in Crisis

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

 

Fotis Mavromatidis and Jeremy Leaman: German Influence in the Western Balkans: Hegemony by Design or by Default?

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

 

Catherine Samary: The Social Stakes of the Great Transformation in the East

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

Workshop Organizers: Overview of Projects on Peripherization of Balkan Countries, Supported by RLS SOE

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

Peter Gowan: The NATO Powers and the Balkan Tradegy

Western powers usually legitimize military interventions in terms of a proclaimed commitment to some universalist norm or to some goal embodying such a norm. These declared goals can oscillate, but they are important because a central element of their foreign policy, particularly when it involves starting a war, is maintaining the support of their domestic population. More