The Politics of Privatization and Europeanization in Europe's Periphery: Slovenian Banks and Breweries for Sale?

Abstract

Many theoretical approaches to Europeanization of EU applicant states portray the process as top-down: governing elites in applicant states conform to EU conditions, constituents provide a permissive consensus and all applicant states converge toward a single EU model. Such approaches direct less attention to how Europeanization is a dynamic, contradictory and contestable process. This case study considers how common pressures of Europeanization both constrain and enable domestic politics in particular domestic fields. We focus on two sites of Europeanization in Slovenia: political debates surrounding the restructuring of the Slovenian banking sector and political turmoil over the sale of Slovenian breweries to foreign investors. In both cases, domestic societal actors managed to hinder and, in one case, halt, the full-scale liberalization and privatization of the Slovenian economy. These actors not only appealed to nationalist interests, namely the preservation of Slovenia's gradualist or nationalist–capitalist development path; they also framed these political struggles within a larger European political sphere.