Neoliberal Doctrine Meets the Eastern Bloc: Resistance, Appropriation and Purification in Post-Socialist Spaces

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

This collection is the outcome of a set of sessions of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, held in Washington, DC on 14-18 April 2010. The collective title of the sessions was: ‘How do basic concepts shift in neoliberal projects? Evidence from the postsocialist world and beyond’. The authors thank Dr Kathrin Horschelmann, Durham University (UK) for the inspiration and support throughout the development of the special issue. Special thanks also to the editorial staff of Europe-Asia Studies, and in particular Prof Terry Cox, Sarah Lennon and Maggie Sinclair, as well as the anonymous referees that made this work possible.

¹ For example, the EU Regional and Cohesion policies backed by the EU Regional Development Funds on occasion push for competitiveness and spreading neoliberal ‘best practices’; yet at other times they aim to respect differences and overcome inequalities between nations and between regions (McEwen 2011; Sellar & McEwen 2011).

² Swain specifically described the transformation of a whole array of institutional structures emerging from the interactions between foreign consultants and local leaders in the restructuring of Ukraine's energy sector.

³ A related thesis of post-socialism as the purified version of ‘post-modern’ neoliberalism has been advanced in cultural anthropology by Kharkhordin (1995, 1997) and in cultural geography by Hirt (2008).