Peripheral integration and disintegration in Europe: the ‘European dependency school’ revisited

Reproducing uneven development on the Hungarian housing market

“…The political and economic consequences of the 2008 crisis have led to a growing number of inquiries about core-periphery relations in the European Union. Critical voices are strengthening that underline that the European project has, from the outset been built in a way to support the economic growth of core countries (Weissenbacher 2017), while systematically displacing crisis to the peripheries (Jessop 2014). These new critiques resonate with arguments of the so-called European dependency school, which had emerged in the wake of the crisis of the 1970s and the subsequently exploding indebtedness of the European periphery (Weissenbacher 2017).…”

“…, Vliegenthart 2010. Historically, this new disciplinary branch builds on the European dependency school of the 1970s (Weissenbacher 2017), who had developed this approach in their quest to explain increasing spatial inequalities in the wake of the crisis of the '70s. In its contemporary application, questions of debt become central and the institutional structures of the EU are analysed from the perspective of the core-periphery relations they sustain -while taking the global economic hierarchy seriously.…”

“…Critical voices are strengthening that underline that the European project has, from the outset been built in a way to support the economic growth of core countries (Weissenbacher 2017), while systematically displacing crisis to the peripheries (Jessop 2014). These new critiques resonate with arguments of the so-called European dependency school, which had emerged in the wake of the crisis of the 1970s and the subsequently exploding indebtedness of the European periphery (Weissenbacher 2017). These authors built on the tradition of the Latin-American dependency school and world systems theory, but this line of research had later been swallowed in the neoliberal convergence euphoria of the late 1980s and 1990s.…”

“…Reconceptualisations of "old" (originating from the previous crisis cycle of the 1970s) critical theoretical approaches would also be highly relevant based on the work of the so-called European Periphery Group (Weissenbacher 2017). This was a relatively short-lived convergence of scholars belonging to the European dependency school (for which the institutional frame was the European Association of Development Institutes) in the early 1980s, who produced an edited volume entitled "The crises of the European regions" (Ostrom-Seers 1983).…”

“…Financial flows and debt are currently the main vehicle of how this happens, with the post-crisis austerity regime giving the institutional framework for the latest wave of this phenomenon (ibid). Scholars of the Institute for International Economy and Development at the Vienna Economics University have started to build on this body of work, aiming to conceptualise currently increasing regional inequalities in peripheral European countries in the context of their dependent integration in the European economic space (Weissenbacher 2017).…”