Abstract
This paper explores the impact of European Structural Funds (ESF) on the change of forms and morphologies, i.e. strategic and spatial selectivity, of state (power, intervention, projects) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since the European Union's enlargement in 2004. By doing so, it brings the ESF into the research on CEE's political economy which has paradoxically neglected them, while dealing mostly with the impact of foreign direct investment on the formation of CEE's capitalist state(s).
This happened despite the fact that the ESF have arranged almost equivalent inflows of foreign capital into the region and played an enormous role in the CEE's embedding in European and global circuit of capital. Hence, this paper employs a Critical Political Economy perspective on the ESF as major ideational-material sites of the region's post-accession Europeanization which powerfully shape, albeit do not determine, the outcomes of CEE's political-economic restructuring.
Thus, reviewing the problem-solving literature on ESF, it enriches-using CEE's empirical experience as a 'useful knowledge'-the critical analysis of European integration. In general, it contributes to the ongoing discussion on the distinct features of dialectic between 'the national' and 'the European'/'the international' in the CEE as a supposedly variegated space of Europe's (semi-)peripheral capitalism(s).