Theorizing the EU Cohesion Agenda in Central and Eastern Europe: Transnational Regulation of Peripheral Development
Abstrakt
The scholarship on EU cohesion agenda (in CEE) lacks a political economy perspective, let alone the critical one. Rather, the research on cohesion agenda has been dominated by the EU Studies field which studied it as an individual institutional case of the EU Cohesion Policy.
Against this background, this paper strives to theorize the role of EU cohesion agenda (in CEE) from the perspective of critical Comparative Capitalism (CC). Aware of its neo-institutionalist and problem-solving bias, the paper departs from a sympathetic critique of EU studies scholarship in order to engage it with the CC field.
By doing this, it tries to develop a critical interpretation of the cohesion agenda as a case of 'Transnational Regulation of Peripheral Development'. Such an interpretation aims at addressing the elephant in the room of contemporary (EU Studies) research on cohesion agenda: the uneven capitalist development.
Addressing the elephant, we can fully understand the multifaceted enabling role of cohesion agenda in reregularizing the power asymmetries and socioeconomic inequalities in Europe's core-peripheral relations which are inherent to the EU as a capitalist regional order. More importantly, this interpretation explores how and in what ways such a historically contingent regional order strives to temporarily establish its always unstable 'structured coherence' (i) on both social life's levels of material regime(s) of accumulation and ideational mode(s) of regulation as well as (ii) across the multi-scalar (peripheral) landscapes of Europe's transnationalizing capitalism in both space and time.
Departing from a critique of the mainstream EU Studies research, the paper fills the knowledge gap of critical approaches to European integration (in CEE) above all.