Stuart Shields

Too Much Shock, Not Enough Therapy: Transnational Capital and the Social Implications of Poland's Ongoing Transition to a Market

In this article, an argument is presented for the return of labour to centre stage in the critical study of transition. The transition to capitalism in Eastern Central Europe generally, and Poland in particular, is discussed and the negative social impacts of transnational capital in post-communist development and the reconstitution of the Polish state in favour of (transnational) capital interrogated, through an exploration of the ever-deeper embedding of neoliberalization. There has been a reworking of the institutional infrastructures where the communist and post-communist political economy was grounded and transnationally oriented social forces in the EU continue to export the core of the neoliberal deregulatory programme to the east. Enlargement measures have further embedded a highly selective application of Europeanisation in what is becoming an increasingly vituperative variant of neoliberalism. The article concludes by assessing the recent neo-populist turn in Poland and how this might be reconciled with neoliberal strategies.

State, Capital and Labour in Transition: The Political Economy of Capitalist Diversity in Eastern Europe - Introduction to special issue

As we put the final touches to this special issue of Competition and Change an ultra conservative, neo-populist government in Poland have forced the resignation of another ‘informer’ for the communist secret services, the repercussions of neo-Nazi violence during Hungary’s fiftieth anniversary celebration of the 1956 revolution continue to reverberate around Budapest, and the Russian oil company Transneft is threatening to cut off oil supplies to Europe. These are ‘interesting’ times for the former communist states of Eastern Central Europe (ECE) and a reconsideration of the region’s relationship to globalization, which would be of interest at any time, seems particularly apposite at this juncture, stimulated as much by European Union (EU) accession as by continuing global economic integration. It now seems clear to many that, like the construction of socialism after 1945, so the reconstruction of capitalism after 1989 has not just been a matter of applying a proven blueprint for the construction of a New Jerusalem on each national territory. Rather it has been the result of intense social conflicts whose outcomes were importantly shaped by the specific historical context of the global political economy. For the most part, ‘transitological’ studies of ECE, and the Soviet bloc as a whole, since 1989 have only incidentally acknowledged the significance of the global context in which capitalism was restored. Uniquely in the world, ECE has built democratic capitalism at the same time as it has become integrated into the globalizing and regionalizing world economy. For us, and the contributors to this special issue, this has generated the following set of research questions that we attempt to address: what types of capitalism have emerged from this unique challenge? How have global and European constraints and opportunities shaped the local political economies of ECE? How have local actors made use of these constraints and opportunities?

Neoliberalism Redux: Poland’s Recombinant Populism and its Alternatives

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.

Opposing Neoliberalism? Poland's renewed populism and post-communist transition

Abstract This article interrogates the social impact of neoliberalisation and the counter-hegemonic forces this has engendered by exploring Polands 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 Polands 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.

Space, the Latest Frontier? A Scalar-Relational Approach to Critical IPE

This chapter focuses predominantly on the treatment of the international as a space within International Political Economy (IPE). This edited volume highlights, albeit often implicitly, two areas of concern within IPE. Many of the chapters tend to focus on the relationship between the political and the economic, for example in addressing the relationship between IPE and International Relations (IR). We argue that where the relationship between the political and economic has been the primary focus of debate within the discipline, the analogous question of the relationship between different spaces has been anything but clear. We further argue that in spite of numerous attempts to overcome it, the national-international dichotomy continues to permeate too much of contemporary IPE. We see this as somewhat ironic, given that critical IPE has deliberately positioned itself in opposition to orthodox IPE precisely because of the orthodoxy’s failure to capture the social content or underlying power structures of global capitalism. This is most obvious in those attempts that analyse the historical and social but only include space as a nodal point for analysis of the political agency of capital (compare Morton, 2007b; Underhill, 2003). In contrast we argue that a more nuanced understanding of space as one constitutive element of capitalism is central to the notions of emancipation and resistance which are at the heart of a critical IPE project.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development's Gender Action Plan and the Gendered Political Economy of Post-Communist Transition

Abstract In this article, we explore the European Bank for Reconstruction and Developments (EBRDs) place in the gendered political economy of Eastern Central Europes post-communist transition. We document the gendered modalities surrounding the EBRDs 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 EBRDs gender aware activities. Both policies illustrate how the EBRDs 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.

Conclusion: IPE and the international political economy? IPE or the international political economy?

Our intention in bringing together this collection of scholars has been to begin a process of reflection on why volumes such as these are particularly timely in the current period, for both the discipline of IPE and the study of the international political economy. Although the debates on the ‘British’ and ‘American’ schools were an important catalyst for such reflections, they also built upon earlier marginalizations and silencings which were, in our view, unwarranted. Recall, for example, Robert Keohane’s more explicit invitation in the late 1980s to ‘reflectivist’ scholars to produce systematic research agendas and falsifiable claims as a means of engaging with the ‘rationalism’ dominant in IR — in other words, a demand for ‘post-positivist’ research to abandon its raison d’etre and engage in narrow specifics which take for granted wider questions about the world in which we live. More recently, the explosion of contributions on ‘globalization’ tended to produce a neat conjuring trick, whereby a globalized world was (magically and tautologically) both the outcome — what needed to be explained — and the explanation of this outcome. In the process, alternative narratives were pushed to the sidelines (Rosenberg, 2000).

Critical International Political Economy and the Importance of Dissensus

This short piece responds to Matthias Kranke’s extended review of our 2011 book Critical International Political Economy: Dialogue, Debate, Dissensus. We reiterate the book’s commitment to challenging disciplinary orthodoxies and immanent critique. The response also observes how the review elides a number of crucial definitions to abrogate our commitment to an expansive disciplinary engagement.

Introduction: ‘Critical’ and ‘International Political Economy'.

Since the late 1970s, International Political Economy (IPE) has tended to be divided into those scholars who focus primarily upon empirical research questions in order to understand the dynamics of actors within the international system, and those who prefer to focus upon an ontological enquiry into its historical evolution. In recent developments this division has been extended into the ‘British’ and ‘American’ schools, or more vividly into the division of the ‘orthodox/heterodox’ or the ‘positivist’ and the ‘critical’ (Murphy and Nelson, 2001, 2002; Cohen, 2008a), which in turn has led to concerns that such divisions might be overplayed (Higgott and Watson, 2008). The development of critical perspectives in IPE has brought with it interpretations that have drawn from Marx, Gramsci, Polanyi, Schumpeter and from poststructuralism (especially Foucault), and have been applied to a wide variety of cases. Yet, for all the work done in developing this critical ontology, precisely what binds the diversity of approaches remains confusing, as core analytical categories are too often assumed to be self-evident (for example, the critical method, methodological eclecticism, and a multidisciplinary approach).