Category: Eastern Europe

Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Post-Soviet Currency Boards

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The surge of right-wing populism in East-Central Europe is often portrayed as an unforeseen shift from the earlier post-1989 liberalization path. The “illiberal transformation” narrative underlines stark differences between the policy arsenals that informed democratization and marketization reforms in the early 1990s and those fueling current “democratic backsliding.” Yet this framing conceals the analytical maneuver of disconnecting the political sphere from its socioeconomic counterpart, thereby limiting democracy to the former and defining democratic participation based on electoral competition.

It was precisely this separation, which at the dawn of post-communist transformation, tended to align democratization not with leveling erstwhile power and wealth disparities, but with eradicating rent-seeking by the lingering elements of Soviet bureaucracy. Conceived in this way, democratization was deemed to be an engine of market reforms. Insofar as much of the “transitology” scholarship operated with a parochial “democracy” versus “authoritarianism” dichotomy, it repeatedly obscured authoritarian tendencies in consolidating democratic systems.

In the recently published article Democratic Facades, Authoritarian Penchants: Post-Communist Monetary Restructuring in the Baltic States, I argue that the corpus on “authoritarian neoliberalism” is well-positioned to instigate a much-needed departure from this externalization of “political” and “socioeconomic” spheres when revisiting the intricacies of post-communist transformation in general and monetary reforms in the Baltic states in particular.

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Sino State Capital and the Strengthening of Serbian Stabilitocracy

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Chinese labour workers and their team manager laying the tracks on the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the Belgrade-Budapest railway. Source: author’s own.

The Belgrade-Budapest Railway has been lauded as the flagship Belt and Road project of the wider Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, and as such is promoted by Beijing as a successful template for Sino-CEE cooperation concluded via the 17+1 initiative, established in 2012 to foster relations between China and 17 CEE countries. In its host context of Hungary and Serbia, the investment has been politicised from the get-go, wherein criticism has largely focused on the project’s violation of EU public procurement rules, which require competitive dialogue and open-tender processes for projects of substantial size.

We would expect the Belgrade-Budapest Railway to be subject to greater scrutiny in both Hungary, as an EU member state, and Serbia, where external legitimacy of the EU is an important cornerstone of regime legitimacy, stemming from broad-based support for EU integration and cooperation. While this has played out in Hungary where there have been protests and where the EU launched infringement proceedings against the construction for non-compliance, the Serbian section has proceeded relatively unhindered.

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