EU Cohesion Agenda and the East-Central European State: Fixing the Capitalist Development on Europe's Periphery
Abstract
This paper inquires into how the European Union's Cohesion Agenda has impacted on the changing spatial and strategic selectivity of state intervention in East-Central Europe (ECE) since the EU enlargement in 2004. In this sense, it focuses on the introduction of EU Cohesion Agenda into the research on ECE's capitalist development with particular focus on Visegrád states (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia).
This brand of research has paradoxically neglected the Cohesion Agenda, while it dealt mostly with the role of Foreign Direct Investment in the formation of ECE capitalist state(s). This happened despite the fact that the EU Cohesion Policy and its Structural Funds have brought almost equivalent inflows of foreign capital into the region and played an enormous role in producing the Visegrád model of capitalism as a distinct form of spatio-temporal fix within European and global circuits of capital.
Hence, this paper employs a Critical Political Economy perspective on the EU Cohesion Agenda as a crucial ideational-material site of the region's post-2004 political economic restructuring in order to examine how such agenda has been powerfully shaping the state intervention into capitalist development on the EU's Eastern periphery.