As geopolitical tensions and a global shift to industrial policy transform geoeconomic relations, many commentators have been pointing at potential emancipatory aspects arising from this process. On one hand, industrial policy in the Global North is often presented as improving the bargaining position of organized labor. On the other hand, great power rivalries are also expected to enhance autonomy for third countries, which may “hedge” geoeconomic competition and open non-aligned options after the end of unilateral US domination. For populations threatened by climate change, green industrial policy promises the possibility to build alliances with green capital in the context of growth-based green transition as a flexible maneuver space for emancipative movements. Yet the limits and potential counterforces to these options, or the question of how to exactly assess this maneuver space of emancipative efforts in the context of geoeconomic rivalry, have been less addressed.
This series features authors who research East European countries situated on geopolitical border zones and characterized by long-term external economic dependence, where current geopolitical tensions and geoeconomic restructuring are rapidly transforming the maneuver space of local regimes. What do these positions tell us about third-country maneuvering and its limits in the current global context? How are these positions transformed in the context of global industrial restructuring? And what theoretical considerations do they highlight as necessary to grasp the potential impacts of geoeconomic transformation?
David Karas proposes a regulationist framework to compare ongoing reconfigurations in the internal and international dimensions of American and European capitalism.
Lela Rekhviashvili and Evelina Gambino examine the extractive character of infrastructure-led development and discuss how previous failures prefigure the revival of infrastructure projects, focusing on two large infrastructure projects in Georgia: the Deep Sea Port of Anaklia and Namakhvani Hydropower Plant (HPP) projects.
Nina Djukanović focuses on Serbia's resistance to lithium mining and the Western Balkans' semi-peripheral position in relation to the EU. Analyzing this in the context of the EU’s twin green and digital transitions, she offers a critique of green extractivism and growth-based solutions to climate change.
Agnes Gagyi, Tamás Gerőcs, and Linda Szabó show how the current Hungarian regime’s geopolitical balancing supports a historic wave of reindustrialization at the intersection of German and East Asian EV and battery production chains.
Dispatch 2024.2
Industrial Policy in Geoeconomic Restructuring: A Dispatch Series from East European Authors
By Agnes Gagyi, Nina Djukanović, Evelina Gambino, Tamás Gerőcs, David Karas, Lela Rekhviashvili, Linda Szabó, 11 April 2024, PDF