Integrating peripheral Europe: the different roads to ‘security and stability’ in Southern and Central Europe

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of peripheral capitalism, which was erroneously applied to the democratic transition and international integration of Spain, Portugal and Greece in the 1970s and 1980s, is a useful conceptual tool to understand the present incorporation of countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into the European heartland of transnational production and finance. The relatively successful incorporation of Southern Europe, inter alia exemplified by the outward expansion or transnationalization of Spanish, Portuguese and Greek capital in recent years, is absolutely no guarantee that a similar development will occur in the case of Central and Eastern Europe (after enlargement). The political and economic transformation in this region is much more complex than the previous democratic transition in Southern Europe, and takes place under fundamentally different, domestic and international circumstances. The absence of an indigenous capitalist class, the denationalization of the respective economies, the dominant role of transnational social forces in imposing neo-liberal restructuring on the post-1989 managerial elites, and the neo-liberal underpinnings of the present European Union's (EU) enlargement strategy all point at the peripheralization of the new capitalist democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.