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Shortlisted for the 2013 BISA IPEG Book Prize, this book explores how Eastern Europe's post-communist transition can only be understood as part of a broader interrogation of neoliberal hegemony in the global political economy, and provides a detailed historical account of the emergence of neoliberalism in Eastern Central Europe.Adopting an innovative Gramscian approach to post-communist transition, this book charts the rise to hegemony of neoliberal social forces. Using transition in Poland as a starting point, the author traces how particular social forces most intimately associated with tran

Shortlisted for the 2013 BISA IPEG Book Prize, this book explores how Eastern Europe's post-communist transition can only be understood as part of a broader interrogation of neoliberal hegemony in the global political economy, and provides a detailed historical account of the emergence of neoliberalism in Eastern Central Europe. Adopting an innovative Gramscian approach to post-communist transition, this book charts the rise to hegemony of neoliberal social forces.

This article asks why Poland's populist Prawo i Sprawiedliwości [Law and Justice] government promotes progressive forms of social reproduction in the context of the supposed crisis of neoliberalism. It illustrates how populism is a response to the ongoing social ambiguity of post-communist transition that redefines and recombines existing and novel political and social resources that are built both on and with existing social arrangements in Poland. It achieves this by analysing the current government's flagship child benefit programme: 500Plus. The article claims that certain gender norms construct hegemonic neoliberal and populist discourses that legitimise particular policies, illustrating this by bringing into dialogue Janine Brodie's neoliberal 'paradox of necessity', with the notion of 'fail forwards' neoliberalisation. The 500Plus policy remains ridden with contradiction, on one hand a potentially progressive intervention in social reproduction that deals with the crisis mode of society but that simultaneously helps ensure the continuation of neoliberalisation.

This article considers the re-emergence of populism in Poland. With an all but absent left, the anti-neoliberal position in Poland emerged from the right. The article explores the processes associated with this and critically evaluates the populist turn asking if this is a rejection of neoliberalism or whether recombinant populism is increasingly compatible with contemporary neoliberalism. Despite widespread dissatisfaction with post-communist transition, first through Shock Therapy, second through Europeanization, and more recently through the so-called global financial crisis, former dissidents have been co-opted into the reproduction of neoliberalism. In the absence of a more forceful left response in Poland, the population has proclaimed its outrage with the hardships of post-communism by discovering a captivating message from the populists. The emergence of populist social forces has become one of the mechanisms for the disenfranchised to make sense of the pressures of neoliberalization. Populism, nationalism and neoliberalism can happily co-exist.