Market integration and room for development in Europe’s peripheries: Constraint or opportunity?

One of the key claims used to legitimate market integration was
that the freer movement of goods, capital, services and labour will
automatically produce benefits for all participating countries
without much supranational intervention. This position is
increasingly being challenged in Europe. Strong political forces in
both the Southern and Eastern peripheries claim the European
project has stifled, rather than improved their ability to grow as
indicated by persisting economic disparities within the EU. Even in
the scholarly literature, the dominating view is that market
integration distributes gains and losses among participating
countries unevenly and it has the uniform effect of decreasing the
room for development in peripheral economies. And while we see EU
attempts to level the playing field by way of transfers and
transnational industrial policies, their role is limited. The
dominating EU strategy for managing developmental diversity still
relies on the disciplinary power of markets and supranational
hierarchies, an approach that is looking ever less convincing. Is
there another way for the supranational strategies to help promote
development in the peripheries? In this podcast, Dr. Julia Langbein
(ZOiS), Prof. László Bruszt (Central European University) and Dr.
Vera Šćepanović (Leiden University) argue that the European Union
can use, and has used in the past, a surprisingly big variety of
strategies to manage the developmental consequences of market
integration in its peripheries. Across the Southern and Eastern EU
member states, as well as in the states outside the EU, these
strategies have shaped both the room for development and the
capacity of domestic states to use this room. As the effect of
these strategies has ranged from political and economic decay to
industrial upgrading and revival, the deeper exploration of these
strategies has relevance also for integration attempts in other
parts of the world. The presented insights got recently published
in a Special Issue for the Review of International Political
Economy. (Music: “Complete” by Modul is licensed under a CC
BY-NC-ND 3.0-License.)