Project summary
The majority of political economists argue that EU member states have lost most of their ability to influence their own developmental pathways because European integration strengthens the market actors at the expense of the state. According to these views, Eastern European countries are even more powerless because their development is entirely dependent on foreign enterprises. This project fundamentally challenges these views by arguing that EU membership offers considerable opportunities and resources for member states to take their own development initiatives: the ongoing interaction between EU-level and national public and private actors creates various institutional arrangements that substantially influence the development of these countries. The project calls these specific institutional arrangements transnationalized developmental regimes (TDRs) and assumes that several variants of them exist in Eastern Europe. By examining Hungary, Poland and Romania, the project seeks to identify and compare the constitutive features of these countries’ TDRs. It also aims to reveal how they function and change over time and what their developmental output is in terms of value added of foreign and EU-funded investments. Moreover, through three regional case studies, the project explores how different TDRs lead to different developmental coalitions of public and private actors at the subnational level.
Principal investigator: Gergő Medve-Bálint
Contributing researchers: András Bíró-Nagy, Ákos Máté
Funding source: TK Large Incubator
Timeline: 2020-2021