Suchergebnisse

The books under review exemplify some of the finest recent work on the historically informed political economy of Central and Eastern Europe. While different in their conceptual frameworks and geographical foci, the titles converge in the advancement of nuanced and convincing arguments, displaying both theoretical acuity and empirical depth to great effect. Bartel, Fabry, and Pula all share a resolute dedication to illuminating the under-explored provenances of neoliberalism and/or globalization in the region, that predate the annus mirabilis of 1989. Their contributions situate the 'Eastern bloc' states within the contours of evolving global political economy and the existential crises engulfing capitalism and 'actually existing socialism' during the 1970s and beyond. The authors expound on the intricate web of global capital accumulation, geopolitical competition, and skilful diplomatic strategy, which served to dismantle the 'Iron Curtain'. Two contributions further assess the postscripts of the 1989 revolutions.

This article approaches the electoral success of Estonia's Conservative People's Party (EKRE) from a Critical Political Economy perspective. It explores immediate and longer-term factors conducive to the surge in the support of this far-right party. After situating the radical rightist reaction in Estonia within the wider continuum of far-right morphologies across Europe, the article attributes the immediate factors explaining EKRE's ascendence to the conjuncture of the 2008 economic crisis and its resolution. It is contended that the authoritarian neoliberal (post-)crisis environments engendered a surveillance-based imposition of fiscal restraint at the European level and recalibrated the repertories of state interventionism at the national spatial scale. In Estonia, this served to (re-)produce the vocabularies of crisis in line with the far-right's sensibilities and eroded the public's trust in the parties of the political mainstream. The analysis of immediate factors behind the rise of the far-right is then supplemented with a forensic examination of popular disenfranchisement with the outcomes of post-communist transformation, the party's ambiguous relationship with neoliberalism and EKRE's class-constituted support base. As will be demonstrated, the far-right has attracted the votes of working-class segments residing in the peripheries of the country as well as poverty-stricken pensioners, youths and the disenchanted sections of the middle class. The article concludes by evaluating the claim that EKRE's inclusion in the coalition government from April 2020 to January 2021 amounted to a break from neoliberalism.