210087 VO BAK15: SpezialVO East European Studies: Eastern Europe in the Global Economy (2024S)

Eastern Europe´s return to the international political economy started during the “long 1970s”, a crucial transformative decade where reforms in the East coincided with a global economic crisis and structural changes in the world economy. As a consequence, East European economies became integrated in the global economy from a (semi)-peripheral position: as debtors, raw material exporters, or exporters of basic industrial goods. The transformations of the 1990s have often reinforced these (semi)-peripheral positions, but have also allowed some countries to modernize and upgrade their economies through the massive inflow of foreign direct investment. At the same time, large scale privatization and global neoliberal restructuring has led to new economic “opportunities” such as money laundering, large-scale corruption in “kleptocracies”, where elites are mostly concerned with channeling state resources away for their private luxury consumption. The course introduces students to these developments. It does so from a combination of comparative and international political economy, that is it looks both at developments on the global level and at how East European countries differ in their integration into the global political economy.