Organic or Resilient Intellectuals? About the Engineers of Economic Transition(s) in Czechia's State-Expert Nexus
Abstract
This paper surveys the historical formation and latest articulation of the neoliberal state-expert nexus in Czechia. Transcending the political-civil society divide, this nexus has consisted of a socio-institutional bloc of neoliberal cadres (i.e. influential academicians, compradore consultants, and state bureaucrats) who powerfully shaped the (trans)formation of Czech capitalist state.
The paper traces the origins of this nexus in the late socialism and reconstructs its resilient evolution across the historical - nationalist, globalist, and austerity - variations of Czech capitalist state. It finds the nexus split into nationalist and globalist fractions, the former leading in the 1990s and the later leading in the 2000s, which both allied in an austerity-based conjunction of the so-called National Economic Council of Government (NERV) during the crisis years of early 2010s.
Gaining direct access to the state apparatus and media attention, NERV experts were according to the then prime minister prepared "to serve the homeland for free [which was] a guarantee of their independence". The analysis of NERV experts' biographical and institutional trajectories can thus document not only the latest articulation but also historical formation of this powerful nexus.
Grounded in the neo-Gramscian theory of organic intellectuals, the paper's bio-institutional and document analysis strives to empirically enrich the research on (re)producers of economic ideas in Central and Eastern Europe. Focusing on internal agents, it also strives to further endogenize the (dominant assumptions about the externally-driven) neoliberalization of this region, while still observing such agents as embedded in transnational social relations.