Embedded Neoliberalism(s) in the EU's Cohesion Agenda: Bringing the Peripheral Development in (European) Order
Abstract
This paper analyses how the European Union (EU) Cohesion Policy has historically co-determined the integration forms of Europe's peripheral capitalisms into the continent's emergent market-making order. Engaging with the critical (Van Apeldoorn) and non-critical (Bohle and Greskovits) interpretations of Polanyian 'embedded neoliberalism', the paper uses the empirical case of EU cohesion agenda to further the reflexive theoretical dialogue between the Critical European Studies (CES) and a broader Comparative Capitalisms (CC) research.
The Cohesion Policy was originally designed to embed the transnational marketization of Europe's unevenly developing core-periphery relations by a supranational Euro-dirigism of material concessions aimed at compensating peripheral populations, but has transformed into a neoliberal form of Ordnungspolitik over time. In this sense, it co-determines the reordering of these relations into seemingly natural and temporarily stable nested hierarchies by: (i) the surveillance of Europe's peripheral capitalisms 'less developed' others and (ii) asymmetrical transnationalization of peripheral states that incentivizes their elites to invest the inflowing concessions in varied strategies of catch-up competitiveness whose social purpose is to fix the extra-economic conditions for a deepened and expanded marketization which is at best valorized by core transnational enterprises' strategies of global competitiveness.
However, such transnational Ordnungspolitik engenders varied forms of embedded neoliberalization across different geo-historical contexts of Europe's peripheries. To exemplify that, the paper foregrounds the post-2004-enlargement Visegrád model of semi-peripheral capitalism that is commonly characterized as dependent on the foreign direct investment (FDI) in complex manufacturing sectors.