Conservative Developmental Statism in East Central Europe and Russia

ABSTRACT

Russia, Hungary and Poland have been at the forefront of the illiberal counter-movement to neoliberalism. However, while there is increasing knowledge about how ‘populism’ as a discursive strategy has brought illiberals to power, especially in Poland and Hungary, we know surprisingly little about the socioeconomic programme and guiding principles of illiberals. In this article, we argue first that there is such a programme and that – notwithstanding the differences between countries – it features a similar programmatic core in the three countries that took shape in conservative think tanks and guides socioeconomic policy recommendations. Second, this programmatic core is best understood not so much as populism, but as a combination of economic nationalism – subordinating the economy to national interests and to the imperative of protecting national identity – and conservatism, reorienting economic policies to serve the traditional family and undo the perceived wrongdoings of post-communist elites, in particular, privatisation. We call this core conservative developmental statism. Thus illiberalism is reducible neither to populism nor to the whims of the power-holders of the day, and in these countries it needs to be seen in a wider context in which rightwing intellectuals have been working in parallel with politicians to give illiberalism a conservative content.

KEYWORDS:

• Economic nationalism
• populism
• conservatism
• post-communist
• developmental state

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Katharina Bluhm is Professor in Sociology and Head of the East European Institute at the Freie Universität in Berlin. Her research focuses on Russia's conservative turn, varieties of capitalism and corporate responsibility. She has recently published (together with Mihai Varga) a comparative volume on New Conservatism in East Central Europe and Russia (Routledge 2019).

Mihai Varga (PhD University of Amsterdam 2011) works as a senior lecturer at the Institute for East European Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on market reforms and their political-economic consequences. He has published on World Bank-inspired reforms, trade unions' responses to worker protests and austerity, and on the rise of right-wing forces preceding or following the financial crisis of 2007–8.

ORCID

Katharina Bluhm http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5620-9781

Mihai Varga http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0278-7145

Notes

1 In both countries many conservative publications have dedicated special issues to ‘sovereignty’; Századvég’s ‘National Interests’ journal even programmatically claims in its first issue to serve sovereignty, while in Poland, Zdzisław Krasnodębski underscored the importance of the topic by agreeing to chair a 2015 conference in Warsaw initiated by President Andrzej Duda and entitled ‘Sovereignty, solidarity, security’.

2 According to EBRD data, foreign ownership in banking assets stood in 2005 at over 80 per cent in Hungary and had reached 85 per cent by 2011. Foreign ownership in Polish banking assets stood highest in 2008 at 76 per cent, but decreased ever since, to 69,5 per cent in 2011 and 62 per cent in 2015 (source: EBRD http://www.ebrd.com/downloads/research/economics/macrodata/Share_of_foreign_banks.xlsx, last accessed 15 February 2019).

3 Often quoted in this context are Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel – two authors rarely referred to in the Polish and Hungarian context (Remizov et al. 2014).

4 But their positions are basically shared by the Izborsk Club (Kobyakov and Aver’yanov 2005, Izborsk Club 2018); see also the programme of the civic organisation Narodnyi Sobor (Aver'yanov and Khomyakov 2010), mainly formulated by the leading authors in Kobyakov and Aver’yanov (2005).