CEE as a New Semi-Periphery: Transnational Social Forces and Poland’s Transition

Abstract

Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has been a region that has been historically considered as semi-peripheral, a characteristic that was highlighted during the authoritarianism of the state socialist era (Martin 1990). The post-communist region has always been considered as ‘back-wards’ part of Europe. As Daniel Chirot puts it, the region ‘was in some sense economically backward long before it was absorbed into the broader Western world market. This backwardness had roots in the very distant past, not in any distortions imposed on Eastern Europe in the past few centuries’ (Chirot 1989: 8). Consequently, attempts to understand the contemporary transformation need to explore the historical trajectory of crucial issues like CEE’s semi-peripheral development. Since the end of the Cold War, the formal re-integration of CEE into the global economy has achieved the restoration of semi-peripherality through two main processes, first that associated with the initial neoliberal transition period and second, a similarly neoliberal Europeanization likewise completed under the auspices of the mobilization of transnational social forces. The focus of this chapter is not to re-engage with previous theoretical usages of the semi-periphery, but to show how such semi-peripheral regions have been integrated into the contemporary world order.