Минали стипендианти

Based on claims to re-install a “healthy” balance between the market and the state, and to “correct” the errors of “neoliberalism” after 1989, today’s anti-liberal governments in Central and Eastern Europe are practicing new forms of state interventionism, state ownership and market regulation, f.i. in the branding of large state-owned enterprises into “national champions”. In order to place the current surge of state interventionism/state collectivism in a historical and comparative perspective, my research aims at finding evidence for the claim that the anti-liberal, often pronouncedly nationalist economic and social agendas mobilize and re-fashion elements of state interventionist/collectivist traditions of economic thought rooted in the interwar period, in socialist reform debates of the communist period, and emulations of foreign role-models.In this context, the case of Poland is particularly interesting. On the one hand, the legacy of Solidarity’s debates about horizontal collective ownership (workers’ shares) comes together with a developed and long-cultivated state interventionist “high culture” of economic theory (associated with scholars like, f.i. Oskar Lange, Ludwik Landau, Edward Lipiński, or Michal Kalecki). On the other hand, Poland has been debated as one of the paradigmatic cases for a turn towards marker-fundamentalist “blueprints” in the economic policies of the late 1980s and early 1990’s transition. My aim is to trace the niches in which state interventionist/collectivist economic ideas could persist as fragments within the alleged liberal consensus and its scripts of economic transition.This case study will attempt to identify and analyse: ideational (dis)continuities, epistemic communities, organizational infrastructures and practices, as well as the circulation and effects of economic knowledge, which re-formulated state collectivist economic ideas within conceptions and criticisms of ownership reforms and the state’s role in industrial policy in Poland since the 1980s. As a contribution to the collective effort of the economic sub-section of the LiT-project, this is meant to offer comparative perspectives to the Hungarian and post-Yugoslav cases, and help to better understand the interplay of scholarly thinking, policy-advise and local experiences of companies as part of the historical genealogy of current anti-liberal political economies.