Faith, Hope, Neoliberalism: Mapping Economies of Violence on the Margins of Europe
Author(s): ELIZABETH DAUPHINÉE
Source: Dialectical Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 3/4, REVISIONS OF NATIONALITY AND
CULTURAL IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY EUROPE (2003), pp. 189-203
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29790686
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^ Dialectical Anthropology 27: 189-203,2003.
TfW ? 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
189
Faith, Hope, Neoliberalism: Mapping Economies of Violence on
the Margins of Europe
ELIZABETH DAUPHINEE
Department of Political Science, York University, Toronto
Abstract This paper explores the manner in which the east of Europe has been theorized in
the post cold war environment, and the implications for our understanding of the relationship
between east and west. It argues that hegemonic discourses of neoliberalism lend a quality of
inevitability to the integration of east into west, which in turn leads to a singular conception
of Europe at the end of a trajectory of development. The paper argues that the relationship of
western Europe to eastern Europe is more fruitfully explored through the conceptual frame?
work of a center to its margins, which allows for a broader range of analysis on the issues conceptual
and implementational - at stake in transition processes, and which will allow for
a theoretical exploration of where power is located and exercised. Because eastern Europe is
understood in scholarly and policy communities as politically and geographically European,
the study of postcommunist transition in Europe falls outside the purview of a development
studies community that is increasingly focused on the emerging north/south divide. In a schol?
arly environment where the East/West divide no longer constitutes a salient focus of study,
there is a need for the development of a framework that will provide a richer understanding
of the reconstituted relationships being formed in Europe in the post-cold war environment.
This paper argues that the social, economic, and political impact of disciplinary neoliberalism
in eastern Europe can benefit from an analysis that takes into consideration the Eurocentric,
disciplinary power that lies at the core of the transition process. Toward this end, it is necessary
to query the discursive foundations of what constitutes the 'properly European' in order to
develop a framework for a more fruitful course of analysis with respect to the relationship
between Europe and its fluctuating eastern margins.
"There is no pure non-violence, but only degrees and economies of
violence, some of which are more fruitful than others."^
It is hardly worth mentioning anymore that the post cold war world has been
increasingly characterized by the centripetal forces of economic globalization
with its attendant free trade regimes, international financial institutions, and
neoliberal regulatory frameworks within which international economic and
political relationships are forged. International attention to the processes and
effects of globalization has been marked by ambiguity, often caught between
the seeming inevitability of the ineffable progress of neoliberal restructuring
and the concomitant backlash that is said to be evident in the centrifugal
forces of identity politics and nationalism in the developing world. Indeed,
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190 ELIZABETH DAUPHINfiE
perhaps what is most striking about the steady encroachment of neoliber
alism on the peoples and societies of the world is the seeming inevitability, or
naturalness, of its progress and the extreme marginalization of its detractors.
Supporters of globalization point to (future) reductions in poverty, greater
social mobility, access to markets, and steadily growing GDPs; detractors
point to growing poverty margins, human conditions of misery in export
processing zones, and a net loss in democratic accountability as the exigen?
cies and contingencies of daily life depend more and more on corporate
leadership than on the traditional representative institutions of state. Accord?
ingly, a flurry of literature dealing with globalization "post cold war" has
developed. This phenomenon has coincided with a shift in academic attention
from the "old" east-west divide to the "new" north-south chasm and, indeed,
there is growing attention to the fundamental inequalities that characterize
this relationship.
The scholarly withdrawal from the "hard" divide between the east and
west of Europe is indicative of the inefficacy of theorizing Europe along the
conceptual lines provided by (and constitutive of) the immobile fixtures of the
cold war.2 Concomitantly, there is a general understanding among scholars
and policymakers alike that the termination of the cold war divide in both
ideological and geographical terms has been replaced by the appearance of,
or desire for, a "complete" Europe that is (or is moving toward) a liberal,
democratic, market-oriented uniform entity. This study seeks to query these
processes, and the claims that appear to render them both natural and inev?
itable outcomes for the states and peoples that occupy the spaces of "east".
At the core of this exploration lies the question of how best to approach the
study of these processes in a political and intellectual environment that is
dominated by the concept of "postcommunism" as a replacement for eastern
Europe, which carries with it the understanding that the postcommunist state
is a state of transition that leads to a singular posited outcome: entry into the
institutional and conceptual terrain of "Europe".
With the apparent closure of the east-west divide (or at least its dra?
matic minimization) the scholarly attention that rushed to the collapse of
communism in central and eastern Europe, and to analyze the destruction
of the Soviet Union and the wreckage of the SFR Yugoslavia has slowly
thinned out, save for those who moved on to the as yet unclear future of
the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Caucasus or those (like myself) who still
look on at the long-failing international attempt at continued political triage
in places like Bosnia and Kosovo. Those post-1989 states that retained their
authoritarian leadership (namely, Belarus, Slovakia until the end of the 1990s,
Croatia until the demise of Tudjman, and the limbless Yugoslavia until the
ousting of Milosevic in October 2000) were increasingly looked upon as
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 191
rogues or holdouts - resisters to the inevitable future of life in the "real"
Europe. For the postcommunist states of central and eastern Europe, life in
the "real" Europe seems to have already been underway for some time. Three
of the Visegrad countries have already acceded to NATO membership, and
five other states - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia - are
expected to join before the end of 2002. Romania and Bulgaria will likely
be invited to join soon after. In post cold war Europe, NATO expansion is
not just the provision of a security umbrella and the integration of technolo?
gical strategic military systems. It also crucially paves the way for, even as it
responds to, the unification processes at work across the European continent.
Observers of NATO's eastward expansion have noted that "the move is seen
... as a key step towards reuniting the European continent and strengthening
democracy in the old Soviet bloc".3 The Washington Post cited former U.S.
ambassador to Poland Daniel Fried and others on the U.S. National Security
Staff as explaining that "expanding NATO would mean expanding the area of
democracy, free markets, and stability in Europe".4
More importantly, perhaps, and requisite for accession to organizations
such as NATO, has been the concomitant "re-Europeanization" of the states,
societies, and regions "lost" to communism after the Second World War.
This process of "transition" has been central to the experience of post
communism in Europe, and has included a host of measures designed to
liberalize, privatize, and otherwise restructure the command economies of
eastern states in order to make them compliant with the market systems of the
west. It has also involved processes of democratization, institution-building,
media reform, and civil society development along established western lines.
And although some observers have detected problems with the progress of
transformation, no one has seriously challenged the process itself, or the
destination that has been programmed into the conceptual navigation system.
The east reconstituted
In 1992, David Campbell warned that "[t]o proclaim the end of the cold war
assumes that we know what the cold war was. Moreover, the very act of
proclaiming the end of the cold war serves to write history in such a way that
the cold war becomes an era of understanding which is not problematic".5
Similarly, the announcement that eastern Europe is operating in a state of
transition framed by a postcommunist landscape that is the legacy of that cold
war rests equally on a set of unproblematized assumptions. It firstly assumes
that we can identify transition as a process along a trajectory - a teleology of
development and that east European states can be definitively 'placed' at
points along that clearly definable continuum. Second, the identification of a
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192 ELIZABETH DAUPHINIiE
processual transition provides the framework within which a "before" and an
"after" are ontological necessities. Third, the identification of these "before"
and "after" conditions indicates that the trajectory itself is one that moves
in a particular direction, which in turn indicates (the desire for) a singular
outcome - a particular possibility that automatically eradicates or eclipses
other potential outcomes. Fourth, the very identification of some states as
"eastern" serves to demarcate them in important ways from states that are not
"eastern" - or, in other words, from those that are posited as "western".6 In
the context of post cold war Europe, however, traditionally rigid conceptions
of "east" are increasingly fragmented and are thus ill-equipped to signify the
hard and fast distinctions that characterized the discursive exigencies of the
cold war. In the span of a single decade, it has become difficult to know, or
agree on, what "east" really is. The intersubjective understandings of east
that fixed the concept in relation to west are no longer fixed. The "east" is in
conceptual, theoretical, and geographic flux. With the accession of Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic to NATO, and the depth of their integration
into the institutional structures of the west, the Visegrad states seem decidedly
less "east" than, say, Ukraine, Bulgaria, or Lithuania. Even if we strive to
retain our conception of the Visegrad and former "eastern bloc" states as
"east", we certainly cannot easily reapply the geographical division indicated
by the so-called iron curtain, because it is patently unimaginable to cling to
the idea of a DDR, no matter what the economic and social difficulties in
Germany's geographic east. Those who would posit the east as beginning at
the Odra River are already experiencing some slippage as a result of Poland's
economic and military integration with the west, and identifying the Odra
as a meaningful boundary will not likely be tenable if (when) Poland is
admitted to the European Union. The "east", then, is a category in flux, where
conceptual understandings are no longer firmly attributable to the particular
territories that were once identifiable by their relegation to the "other" spatial
and ideological side of the iron curtain.
The cold war east/west divide gave way with the seeming demise of com?
munism to a political imaginary that disrupted dominant conceptions of east
and west as oppositional entities. The postcommunist political imaginary
in the west foresaw the unification of Europe, and the east became a site
onto which the ambitions, needs, and desires of a new Europe were formed
and mapped, even as the west became the object of desire for some in the
east. In this political framework, all of Europe, with its seemingly conti?
nental desire for democracy, became, essentially, "west". But "west" could
make little discursive sense without the juxtapositional "east" written as the
communist, command economy, authoritarian other. The political imaginary
of geographic and conceptual "west" gave way to a geographical and concep
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 193
tual "center" toward which the postcommunist states could be drawn. What
could not be drawn, reformed, reeducated, and absorbed, was reconstituted as
"marginal".
The margins of Europe can thus be identified as both physical places
and conceptual spaces, and are marked by the identification of marginal
social forms, marginal histories, marginal economies, and marginal polit?
ical practices that have been posited as alien to the west of Europe. These
margins are territorial - in the sense that they are composed of postcom?
munist states - but they are also shifting, insofar as not all postcommunist
formations are marginal, and not all postcommunist formations are European
- and they are conceptual, in the sense that they continue to be separated
from the west of Europe in social, political, ideological, economic, and
historical ways. Kopstein and Reilly provide us with one way to draw the
distinctions: "[a] handful of countries (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic,
Slovenia, and perhaps the Baltic States and Slovakia) have made significant
progress in marketization and democratization. A much longer list (Albania,
Croatia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania, Yugoslavia, and the former non
Baltic Soviet republics) has made far less progress ... by 1995, it was already
possible to see the contours of at least two very different (and stable) post?
communist outcomes, one increasingly 4[w]estern' and the other decidedly
not".7 Kopstein and Reilly argue that postcommunist outcomes are directly
related to eastern states' geographical proximity to the west, and point to the
"spatially dependent nature of the diffusion of norms, resources, and insti?
tutions that are necessary to the construction of political democracies and
market economies in the postcommunist era".8
Grounding the possibilities of postcommunism in geo-dependent terms
pushes the margins of Europe eastward, and positing geographical loca?
tion as an important prerequisite for successful emulation adds a quality
of inevitability to the assertion that "geographically isolated" states are
structurally relegated to the outer space of the nonEuropean. However, the
increasing inadequacy of "east" as an indicator of geographical and ideolog?
ical continuity means that the criteria of what constitutes the conceptual east
must be reconsidered. No longer simply a function of space, difference or
deviation from the western iteration of Europe is increasingly constituted
by measuring progress in democratization and free marketization - or, in
other words, Europeanization. This scenario suggests the proposition that the
"Europe" toward which the postcommunist world is ostensibly moving is no
longer a "west" awaiting the incoming of the "east" (because once "east"
has arrived in this "west", the terminology of "west" and "east" collapse on
themselves), but rather an "outer" arriving in an "inner", or "center". In this
way, then, the margins of Europe have been imbued with a sense of mobility
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194 ELIZABETH DAUPHINfiE
on the basis of the progress made in their movement either towards or away
from the center.9
The margins of Europe, then, are thus not because of their particular polit?
ical and economic forms or because of their geopolitical locations. As we
are seeing with the incoming of the east, histories (and their renarrativiza
tions) are not immutable. Similarly, with respect to the increasing inefficacy
of the descriptor "east", categories of signification are not immutable, ahis
torical, or vested with a fixed and singular meaning. Rather, the margins
of Europe are margins because of the particular discursive practices afoot
in Europe that assign particular attributes significance. It is through our
intersubjective agreement on "what matters" that we come to know partic?
ular post-socialist states as backward, inefficient, underproducing, politically
juvenile, oppositional in their identities, and generally untrustworthy.10 These
are characteristics, however, which, no matter how seemingly entrenched in
particular eras, are understood to be malleable with perceived alterations
to potentially reconstitutable relationships. In the postcommunist era, the
east of Europe is understood to be just one such malleable entity because
of its susceptibility to the guidance offered through Western political and
economic assistance.11 Indeed, not only can these states be transformed,
but they must be transformed if they wish to be understood as properly
European. Transformation, then, is not a fixed process with clear origins and
outcomes on a politically neutral and inevitable continuum, but rather occurs
as post-socialist states are instructed in, and respond to, democratization,
marketization, restructuralization, privatization, liberalization, and so on.
Furthermore, political, economic, and social structures (and conceptions
of them) in the states of eastern Europe have been fundamentally recon?
stituted not just in voluntary imitation of western liberal democracies, but
in obligation to Western-dominated financial institutions. The consensual
aspects of neoliberal restructuring rest on the promise of an eventual place in
Europe via the European Union and NATO. Implicit in the promise of Europe
is an understanding that these states are not yet properly European. They are
less than Europe - outside the center - but they can be brought inward,
and this is reflected in political, intellectual, and institutional discourses
that urge the eastward moving margins of Europe to catch up, modernize,
privatize, democratize, marketize, and otherwise advance. Within the para?
meters of neoliberal and neoclassical economic theory, such concepts are
perceived and rendered as value-free, objective requirements of economic and
political success, rather than as particular products of particular historically
generated subjectivities on how legitimate political communities should
operate. Indeed, Stefan Andreasson has noted that the "rhetoric of unavoid
ability, and inevitability, is often employed by proponents of global financial
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 195
liberalization", which in turn "preempts] criticism of problems associated
with [particular] economic developments".12
Increasingly, many in the development community are recognizing the
Eurocentrism of neoliberal development frameworks and their inappropri
ateness as models for the development of non-European societies. However
useful the concept of Eurocentrism may be in an analysis of the eastward
moving margins of Europe, the increasingly vocal charge of Eurocentrism on
a global scale serves to render specificities in the east of Europe invisible,
even if it is evident that the marginal spaces of Europe are not the originary
spaces from which hegemonic European discourses emerge and are conso?
lidated. The problem is that, even though east Europe is not-yet-Europe, it
is still too Europe to be picked up by a development radar screen that has
oriented itself primarily along a north/south axis. What is more, the dominant
perception that the east and west of Europe are increasingly in the process
of integration, coupled with the truly horrific political, economic, and social
situations that require immediate attention in much of the global south, means
that the east of Europe is likely to appear more European as time passes
and as it increasingly displays democratic and neoliberal forms, and so these
areas are increasingly less likely to be approached in the future through the
north/south comparative frameworks of development theorists. However, it is
clear that the east of Europe and the neoliberal processes and effects at work
within might be elucidated to some extent through attention to the Eurocentric
practices of development, even if it is not entirely appropriate to theorize the
east along a north/south axis, given the tremendous disparities between the
east and the south writ large.
(Western) Eurocentrism has been characterized with respect to the south
in a number of ways that are appropriate for a richer understanding of the
relationship of Europe to its eastward moving margins. In the north, Euro?
centrism has "impoverished development studies and related disciplines by
blocking access to alternative concepts and indigenous sources of knowledge
from the developing countries themselves. In the [s]outh, it has perpetuated
intellectual dependence on a restricted group of [w]estern academic institu?
tions that determine the subject matter and methods of research ... [further,]
knowledge filters down from a select group of [f]irst [w]orld academic insti?
tutions to the intellectual elite of developing countries".13 These processes
can also be located in the east of Europe, where intellectual elites are
increasingly expected to conform to neoliberal and neoclassical economic
theoretical imperatives, thereby acting as local knowledge-brokers for Euro?
centric political and economic requirements. What John Brohman identifies
as the social relations and structures of non-western societies (i.e., the pres?
ence of peasantries and other non capitalist social forms, as well as the
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196 ELIZABETH DAUPHINfiE
existence of an important informal sector) are also often found in the societies
of east Europe.14 Consider, for example, the vast informal educational, health
oriented, and judicial forms that developed among Albanians in Kosovo
alongside, and in place of, the formal Yugoslav/Serbian sectors, or the well
documented kinship systems that developed in many socialist states for barter
and the local exchange of goods and services. The scholarly assertion that
there is a "Eurocentric domination of developing countries" is a charge that
might usefully be leveled at development strategies in the east of Europe,
as the encroachment of western neoliberal forms dismantles and disrupts
the kinship and other informal structures that are in some cases radically
distinct from the experience of west Europe. Because the east of Europe is
still viewed from outside of Europe as Europe, the pull from the center is
much more difficult to theorize as a product of Eurocentrism. Making Europe
"more European" through a disciplining of its margins is not a violence that
often appears on the radar screens of those who theorize neocolonialism,
neoimperialism, or development more generally.
The IMF and westward moving eastern states
International financial institutions (Ms) are critical sites from which core
neoliberal values are promulgated and enforced. Originally envisaged as a
component of the postwar Bretton Woods system of financial regulation,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is committed to "the expansion and
balanced growth of international trade in a setting of stable and orderly
exchange arrangements", which is to be accomplished by three fundamental
operating principles: (1) pursuit of "universality", wherein the IMF "does not
normally establish distinctions [in its dealings] among countries or groups
of countries". (2) "uniformity of treatment", "allowing for no preferences in
favor of any country or group of countries", and (3) "political neutrality",
whereby the IMF remains focused on the regulation of the international
system, and strives to "maintain an appropriate balance between the interests
of individual members and those of the membership as a whole".15
IMF lending and regulatory programs, despite assertions that they are
"politically neutral", are solidly based on, and have been formed within,
western-dominated commitments to particular codes of economic conduct
that have been developed to promote systems of free market relations framed
within (nominally) democratic institutions. In this sense, institutions like
the IMF overwhelmingly reflect the political and economic interests of
established markets and economic powers. Further, these institutions are
increasingly empowered to ensure that neoliberal values are imposed on
the states that are dependent on IMF loans. Stephen Gill has referred to
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 197
this empowerment as "disciplinary neoliberalism", which is characterized
by the fiscal and political imposition of state, judiciary, and social forms,
and the exercise of surveillance to ensure that these forms are instituted and
maintained. He notes that "[a]t the heart of the global economy there is an
internationalization of authority and governance that involves international
[financial and monetary] organizations" which are "represented in everyday
political discourse and the mass media as an abstract, hyper-rational and
largely uncontested set of social forces and processes".16 Borrowing states
are structurally dependent on the fiscal and political decisions of lending
institutions, which increasingly reflect the interests of mobile capital based
in established western states.
This "virtual control" of national, and by extension, local economic
decision-making capacity is achieved through a number of IMF mechanisms,
including conditionality in lending and surveillance. Under the Articles of
Agreement that form the core of its constitution, the IMF has a mandate
"to exercise firm surveillance over the exchange rate policies of members
in order to oversee the international monetary system and ensure its effective
operation. To this end, the IMF assesses whether a country's economic devel?
opments and policies are consistent with the achievement of sustainable
growth and domestic and external stability".17 This involves a set of rules to
be followed and a series of procedures to ensure their application. The IMF
admits that such rules may be difficult: "[s]ince it sets constraints on behavior,
any code of conduct is typically subject to pressure and confronts a variety
of risks. The pressure reflects a natural tendency to avoid the constraints; the
risks develop out of the incidence or frequency of successful avoidance".18
The risks are not understood as being incurred, as one might expect them to
be, by the borrowing state, but by the IMF itself. Further, "while rules may
give rise to pressure, they also identify deviations clearly and, to that extent,
help contain the risk of their occurrence".19 Thus, any state's attempt to shirk
its neoliberal responsibilities is to be regarded as a "deviation", which can
in turn be understood to be detrimental to the entire international financial
system. "[I]t is worth emphasizing that surveillance, when effective, not only
promotes order in each national economy but also in the system as a whole".20
Catherine Lutz and Donald Nonini have argued that "the dominant neo?
liberal ideology of the new transnational political and economic elites has
been implemented in various neo-liberal projects ... which have entailed
the privatization and minimization of state functions, the reduction of
state expenditures in order to balance budgets, discipline domestic labor,
and attract global investment capital, and the elimination of ... social
programs".21 There is an implicit understanding that, while the international
system envisaged by the IMF and other financial regulatory institutions
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198 ELIZABETH DAUPHINfiE
includes all member states, only some states will find themselves at the
borrowing end of the spectrum. For example, Robert Rubin, former U.S.
Treasury Secretary, had this to say when asked by a group of non-western,
IMF-dependent bankers whether he would ever want to request IMF assist?
ance for the United States: "[i]f I was at Treasury, I could go to the IMF and
say 'we need a program' ... and what's fortunate is that we can influence the
IMF so I could negotiate with myself'.22 With the end of the cold war, the
IMF emerged as the most powerful financial regulatory institution in history,
with more than 182 contributing member states and around $290 billion
in resources.23 Even Jeffrey Sachs, the architect of structural adjustment
programs in Poland and the Russian Federation, has noted that "hundreds of
millions of people depend more on IMF leadership than on their own political
leaders, so intrusive has the IMF become in the weak and vulnerable nations
of the world".24
In the east of Europe, structural adjustment programs accompanied by
neoliberal reform have focused crucially on the privatization of socially
owned enterprises and firms. The not-so-innocuous euphemism for restruc?
turing programs - "shock therapy" - has provided a basis for understanding
the eastward moving margins of Europe in particular value-laden ways. The
term "therapy" cannot be simply viewed as a value-free euphemism; it clearly
indicates that these states have gone terribly wrong somewhere, that they are
at best dysfunctional and at worst pathological, and that IMF, among other
mechanisms and tools of political, economic, and social intervention will help
them to become normal. What remains unclear is whether the "success" of
westward-looking eastern states in implementing the long list of reforms has
mitigated the attendant social costs. The ILO notes that:
[i]n most [e]astern European countries, privatization accompanied by
redundancies and the introduction of hard budget constraints has resulted
in large-scale job losses. This has created a pool of unemployed workers
which often cannot be absorbed by other privatized firms or [by] new
firms. Furthermore ... many workers never appear in the unemployment
statistics because, either before or after the privatization process, they are
sent on leave without pay or with very much reduced pay.25
For example, in Hungary, the state-owned lighting company Tungsram cut
its 35,000 strong workforce by nearly half (to 17,640) in preparation for
its sale to General Electric. Soon after assuming ownership of Tungsram,
GE again halved the workforce to 9,500 by 1993. In Poland, research into
130 companies found that employment fell by 15% in the first year, and
by 25% after the second year of privatization.26 In the Russian Federa?
tion, as in other postcommunist states, "the majority of social services,
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 199
including housing, kindergartens, and recreational facilities, were provided
by firms to their employees free or at a price substantially below cost
... [s]hedding these services has been a major feature of pre- or post
privatization restructuring".27
Moreover, firms that remain committed to the maintenance of social
programs are unattractive candidates for foreign investment, and quickly find
themselves unable to compete with firms that have jettisoned these programs.
Budget deficits and strict conditionality attached to loans means that trans?
formation states must do more than just tighten their belts or streamline in
the social sector. In Moldova, a chronic budget deficit led to measures in
which half of the country's 90,000 health care workers faced being discarded.
"Patients were faced with taking their own food and bed linen into the
hospitals and the health care service was, in effect, privatized, as charges
for services were introduced".28 Similar problems in Bosnia in 1997 required
health care workers there to turn away non-emergency patients. In Bulgaria,
the unemployment rate jumped more than 300% between 1990 and 1997; in
Poland, the increase was more than 100% between 1990 and 2000. Slovakia
struggled with an unemployment rate of 18.9% in 2000, and Macedonia's
1998 unemployment rate was 34.5%.29 Compounding the problem of unem?
ployment is the problem of chronic underemployment. Some firms have been
forced to employ workers on a rotational basis to meet wage obligations;
other firms have simply employed the strategy of non-payment of wages for
months at a time. In many countries that had introduced vouchers as a means
to distribute the benefits of privatization, unemployment and underemploy?
ment has caused the large scale sell-off of these vouchers at minimal prices.
In the Russian Federation, one labor ministry official told an ILO seminar
that "all the [IMF loan] money is going to cover debts - there is no place
for social spending ... science, education, [and] medicine are in desperate
conditions".30
The processes of neoliberal restructuring and their attendant social con?
sequences cannot be understood simply as temporary measures designed
to "balance the books" in the period before full entry into the lifeways of
the "real" Europe can be achieved. In 2000, the IMF warned the eastward
moving margins of Europe that "low wage differentials between skilled and
unskilled workers, and generous unemployment benefits that characterize
much of [w]estern Europe [and which, ironically, characterized much of
eastern Europe before the restructuring began] were detrimental to the goal
of labour market flexibility".31 It is increasingly evident, however, that some
of these eastern margins require yet more instruction. In 2002, the Russian
Federation joined Bosnia in offering foreign investors insurance against
itself. The program, "created with the help of the World Bank, is aimed at
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200 ELIZABETH DAUPHINEE
convincing foreign leaders that the nation's famously perverse bureaucracy
will not stand in the way of commercial success". Moscow is offering up to
$200 million in indemnities to foreign investors who run up against interfer?
ence by "inept or corrupt" officials. In the event that the Russian Federation
fails to pay the claim within 15 days, the World Bank will step in to cover the
costs, and Russia will be required to reimburse the World Bank "or face the
consequences of default to an international financial institution".32
Economies of violence
Jacques Derrida suggests that the hegemonic model of neoliberal capitalism
serves to create a conception of Europe that delineates what Europe or being
European can properly signify. Europeanness, in this conception, can and
should be viewed as a homogenized whole - it is a singular possibility of
identity universally imagined - and difference or deviation from this auto?
biography is alien and unEuropean, and so must be redressed, reformed, or
stamped out. Just as the proclamation of the end of the cold war "assumes
that we know what the cold war was", the "autobiography" of Europe in
what have been identified as the postcommunist "transition" years assumes
a single narrative, composed with knowledge of what Europe is, has been, or
will become, and who or what may be properly included in that designation.
Derrida notes that "it is always in the figure of the [w]estern heading that
Europe determines and cultivates itself; it is in this figure that Europe identi?
fies itself, identifies with itself, and thus identifies its own cultural identity".33
In this way, the collection of knowledge that comprises this "autobiography"
"[n]o doubt presupposes an identifiable heading, a telos toward which the
movement, the memory, the promise, the identity, even if it be as difference
to itself, dreams of gathering itself'.34 Homogenized conceptions of Europe
center on the successful implementation of liberal democratic polities and
market capitalism and common membership in the institutions that regu?
late and define the parameters of political and economic possibility. These
structures contribute to the construction of a particular framework of what
counts as European, and their disciplinary practices provide a uniform and
transposable imaginary as a universal model of politico-economic being. For
a variety of reasons, east European socialist states have not all fit comfortably
into the framework of the European autobiography. This is why we have seen
western hegemonic response to postcommunist possibilities articulated in the
language of democratization, modernization, and marketization. Through the
template of market democracy, which is rendered as the natural evolution
from the primitive world into the modern one, western states and international
financial institutions have sought to incorporate their eastern others into the
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 201
emerging center of Europe. They have done so through IMF restructuring,
the dismantling of socialist welfare states, and through the continuing inte?
gration of national economies into the globalized western free market system.
These forces have brought liberal democracy, national elections, even NATO
in one form or another, in a concerted effort to re-Europeanize these eastern
others. They have also brought political powerlessness, social erosion, and an
unprecedented collapse in income and services.
It has not been my intention here to offer "the Truth" about the "real"
ways in which the east of Europe have been mapped out and reconstituted
in the postcommunist period. Instead, the question of how it is most fruitful
to theorize the manner in which the east is being subsumed by the dominant
narratives of incorporation into the west has been the focus of study. The
collapse of the east/west divide in Europe has led to a representation of the
east that centers on reconstituting its economic, political, and social possi?
bilities in ways that serve to further the discourse of European integration.
It has also arguably reformulated the relationship of east to west as one of
margins to center, which has led to a quality of inevitability in both policy
and scholarly circles that the east is moving toward - or into - the political,
social, and economic realm of the west. This raises the question of how these
processes should be studied in a political and intellectual environment that
has already accepted the "incoming" of the east. One potentially fruitful
course of analysis is to theorize the east of Europe along similar lines as
those offered by development studies so that the Eurocentric/centralizing
practices that characterize this "incoming" can be rendered visible and scru?
tinized in more critical ways. Neoliberal economies of violence that result
in the wholesale reconstitution of economic sectors, the social dislocation
and deprivation that this entails, and the dramatic withering of social safety
nets and services do not, of course, only affect the states and peoples of
eastern Europe. However, there is clearly a sense of legitimacy involved in
these processes as the states of eastern Europe are "prepared" for integration
with the west. With respect to non-European societies, such processes can be
effectively theorized by scholars as Eurocentric, and a potentially wide range
of problematic implications can be addressed. However, because the charge
of Eurocentrism is difficult to apply to Europe itself (i.e., eastern Europe), the
disciplining processes at work in the east of Europe tend to fall outside the
purview of a scholarly community that is increasingly focused on north/south
issues in an era of rapid globalization. This enables the development of a
naturalized consensus that east European postcommunist states are arrayed
along a continuum of transition that leads to a singular posited outcome:
entry into the institutional and conceptual terrain that is "Europe" - at any
price.
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202 ELIZABETH DAUPHINEE
Notes
1. John D. Caputo in John D. Caputo (ed.), "Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation
with Jacques Derrida" (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 47.
2. I have consciously chosen to refer to the east and west of Europe in lower case throughout
this paper. The use of capital letters to designate East and West implies that these entities
are bounded, known, and knowable in particular political and geographical ways, and
there is a whole range of conceptual baggage that therefore accompanies these desig?
nations. Most problematically, the terminology of East and West recalls an ideological
divide that is not well attenuated to any discussion of the post-cold war period and its
possibilities. I have therefore chosen to use the lower case as a continual reminder that
these categories are not immutable - that they are, in fact, socially constructed, contingent
discursive entities whose meanings and designations are in continuous motion.
3. "NATO's Big Push East Will Take In Up To Seven States," Daily Telegraph, 27 September
2002. The George W. Bush administration's post-September 11 impetus to broaden
the 'security umbrella' and seek de jure allies in the war on terrorism is another
important factor. See "NATO to Admit 7 Eastern European Nations," Washington Post,
27 September 2002.
4. "NATO To Admit 7 Eastern European Nations," Washington Post, 27 September 2002.
5. David Campbell, Writing Security (University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 15.
6. Of course, taken even further, it would be necessary to problematize the state itself as
an ontological category. The confines of this paper prohibit a larger discussion of the
state as an ontological category, but the reader can sample such discussions in Jacques
Derrida, "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority," in Cornell, Rosenfeld,
and Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Routledge (London:
1994), and Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic
Exchange, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, 1995).
7. Jeffrey S. Kopstein and David A. Reilly, "Geographic Diffusion and the Transformation
of the Postcommunist World," World Politics 53(1), October 2000.
8. Kopstein and Reilly, "Geographic Diffusion."
9. There is also a parallel to be drawn here within the European Union itself, with the "inner"
space constituted by the Schengen group and the "outer" occupied by the Euro-skeptics.
I am grateful to David Mutimer for this insight.
10. See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 1997),
especially 3-20.
11. A great deal of seminal scholarly work has been oriented around this very question. See
Edward Said Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979), and Maria Todorova, Imagining the
Balkans.
12. Stefan Andreasson, "Neoliberalism and the Creation of "Virtual Democracy" in the
Global South," ISA paper presented in New Orleans, March 2002.
13. John Brohman, "Universalism, Eurocentrism, and Ideological Bias in Development
Studies," Third World Quarterly 16(1), March 1995.
14. John Brohman, "Universalism".
15. Manuel Guitian, "The Unique Nature of the Responsibilities of the IMF," International
Monetary Fund Pamphlet Series No. 46, 1992.
16. Stephen Gill, "Globalisation, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neo-liberalism,"
Millenium 24(3), Winter 1995.
17. IMF Surveillance Fact Sheet: 2001: www.imf.org
18. Manuel Guitian, "The Unique Nature of the Responsibilities of the IMF'.
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FAITH, HOPE, NEOLIBERALISM 203
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Catherine Lutz and Donald Nonini, "The Economies of Violence and the Violence of
Economies ," in Anthropological Theory Today, ed. Henrietta L. Moore (Maiden, MA:
Polity Press, 1999), 94.
22. "Observer: Good Deals," Financial Times, 26 July 2002.
23. IMF resources as of June, 2002. The IMF also retains one of the largest gold reserves in
the world, with assets of 3,217 metric tons valued at $32.4 billion. See "Where Does the
IMF Get Its Money? A Factsheet," International Monetary Fund: www.imf.org 21 August
2002; and "Gold in the IMF, A Factsheet," International Monetary Fund: www.imf.org
August 2002.
24. Jeffrey Sachs, "Time to End the Backroom Poker Game," Financial Times, op ed., 15
November 1999.
25. B. Martin, "The Social and Employment Consequences of Privatization in Transitional
Economies: Evidence and Guidelines," Interdepartmental Action Programme on Privatiz?
ation, Restructuring, and Economic Democracy, Working Paper #4, International Labour
Organization, 1995 (updated 24 January 2000).
26. Martin, "The Social and Employment Consequences".
27. Martin, "The Social and Employment Consequences".
28. Ibid.
29. International Labour Organization, "World Employment Report: 2001," Table 4: Unem?
ployment Rate in Transition Economies.
30. B. Martin, "The Social and Employment Consequences."
31. "IMF Warns Eastern Europe," BBC News, 22 September 2000.
32. "Shady Officials? You're Covered: Russia Insures Investors Against Its Own Failings,"
Washington Post, 21 September 2002.
33. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe (Indiana University
Press, 1992), 25.
34. Derrida, The Other Heading, 25.
Biographical note
Elizabeth Dauphinee is a doctoral candidate in the department of Polit?
ical Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. She holds a doctoral
fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC) and is currently pursuing dissertation research on the ethics
of international intervention and selected problems with peace operations
and implementation in Southeastern Europe. Her primary research interests
include critical security studies, representations of war, intervention, and
peacekeeping; sovereignty, ethics, and theology. She earned her MA from
York University in 2000.
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