Please join the East Central European Center at the Harriman Institute for a talk with Laszlo Bruszt, István Deák Visiting Professor of East Central European Studies.
The good news from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is that, thirty years after elites in the CEE countries declared their program of a “return to Europe,” and fifteen years after the first group of them was allowed to enter the EU, most of these countries still have more or less stable economies and democratic institutions. After the Berlin Wall was brought down, the region had all the ingredients for an unmitigated economic, political and social disaster. The newly democratizing CEE countries, still in the early phase of remaking their economies and societies, started the integration process with an EU that had just departed from the post-WW II settlement of embedded liberalism. The creation of the European Single Market took a considerable degree of control over economic processes out of the hands of democratic governments and left outcomes to the extended markets. The EU had no mechanisms to manage the developmental consequences of integrating emerging market economies, and the CEE countries were flying blind towards the transnational market, largely due to unconditional domestic support for European integration. This talk discusses the factors that led the EU to create provisional institutions that could help foresee and manage the largest potential negative developmental problems of the integration. Instead of transferring the knowledge gained from the workings of these institutions to its Southern peripheries, the EU has discontinued using them in the new member states. This has created a large space for economic nationalism and has contributed to the present crises of the EU.
Laszlo Bruszt is a Professor of Sociology at the Central European University, Budapest, and currently holds the István Deák Visiting Professorship at Columbia University. Between 2004 and 2016 he taught at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His more recent studies deal with the politics of economic integration of the Eastern and Southern peripheries of Europe. His recent publications include “Making states for the single market: European integration and the reshaping of economic states in the Southern and Eastern peripheries of Europe” West European Politics; “Varieties of Dis-embedded Liberalism - EU Integration Strategies in the Eastern Peripheries of Europe” in Journal of European Public Policy” and Leveling the Playing Field – Transnational Regulatory Integration and Development (Oxford University Press, co-edited with McDermott, G.). He co-edited a special issue “Manufacturing development - How transnational market integration shapes opportunities and developmental capacities in Europe's three peripheries” forthcoming at the Review of International Political Economy.
