Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism

Abstract

Using Latour's concepts of "actor-network" and "translation," the authors show that neoliberalism's success in Eastern Europe is best analyzed not as an institutional form diffused along the nodes of a network, but as itself an actor-network based on a particular translation strategy that construes socialism as a laboratory of economic knowledge. They argue that socialism was made into a laboratory of economic knowledge during the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s. An extensive debate during the Cold War is also documented and shows that a transnational network continued to be organized around attempts to connect the results obtained in the socialist laboratory with debates and struggles in Western economics. Finally, the drafting of transition blueprints in postcommunist Eastern Europe after 1989, with the participation of American economists, is shown to be a continuation of this transnational network.After communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989, the new postcommunist governments have embarked, at various speeds, on neo-

Foreword

“…Diverse concepts for the transformation processes were at work and brought together within a 'modernization consensus' rested on the rejection of state socialism and the adoption of 'western' values and institutional practices as models (Böröcz, 1999;Sebők, 2016). Based on this political platform, institutional reforms -supported by international think tanks and the emerging groups of domestic capitalist elites -were pushed forward rapidly along a neoliberal agenda (Bockman and Eyal, 2002) . This turbulent period heated the debates on national and European histories as a context of actual modernization concepts -such as the interpretations of state socialism as a 'detour' vs .…”

On postsocialist capitalism

“…The neoliberal policy prescriptions for the postSoviet bloc say as much about the kinds of structural reforms that need to be implemented to unleash markets as they do about the kinds of behaviors that postsocialist economic subjects ought to engage in to become market actors proper. Such disciplining of postsocialist capitalists was no doubt set in motion because post-1989 changes were happening in a global environment that promoted the Washington Consensus (Williamson 1993;Gore 2000) and was bolstered by the fact that neoliberalism has endogenous roots in socialism (Bockman and Eyal 2002;Bockman 2011).…”

The Contested Post-Socialist Rehabilitation of the Past: Dual Narratives in the Republishing of Tibor Mendöl’s "Introduction to Geography"

“…Although Fraser concentrates on the possibilities of a new political Left following a crisis of vision after 1989, the general question here is whether this condition designates: 1) an historical epoch with structural explanations of demarcation (for example, the "transition" to a market economy); 2) a state of culture, mind, memory, or behavior that lingers on and surfaces contradictorily through inherited structures; or 3) a critical epistemology employed not only to reflect upon "actually existing socialism," but also to explore the middle ground between often essentialized "capitalist" and "socialist" worlds, and "Western" and "Eastern" concepts (Frank 1991, Verdery 1996, Chari and Verdery 2009, Bockman 2011, Lampland 2011). The rather "closed" and sometimes provincialized concepts of both socialism and postsocialism-often as the Oriental "Other" of the West-should also be treated differentially and relationally (Hann et al 2002, Outhwaite and Ray 2005, Stenning and Hörschelmann 2008, Silova 2010, Cervinkova 2012) and should be contextualized along globally uneven relations and circulations (see Bockman and Eyal 2002, Tulbure 2009, Bockman 2011, Gille 2010, Éber et al 2014). But here I will mainly focus on the second above-mentioned aspect of this "postsocialist condition," and its consequences in narrativity and knowledge production in geography.…”