Rudy Weissenbacher - The Core-Periphery Divide in the European Union : A Dependency Perspective

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The idea to this book goes back to the time when the recent global economic crisis had hit Europe more than a decade ago. The crisis has not translated into a reformulation of the prevailing paradigm in economics. Rather, EU crisis management by austerity brought countries of the EU periphery to the brink of collapse. The term periphery experienced a revival but usually not in the context of an interdependence with a core. Such a holistic approach of coreperiphery relationships to the analysis of global capitalism had been typical for the Latin American dependency school. Social scientists I categorize as European dependency school (EDS) had applied aspects of the dependency paradigm to the European situation of coreperiphery relations in the 1970s and 1980s. What I found surprising was the relevance of their analyses for the Europe of today, and the informed prospects formulated for the future of European integration. A call for a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary European Studies on coreperiphery relations, an issue that would never materialize, was the first incentive to revisit the EDS in writing. The 20th Conference on Alternative Economic Policy in Europe (Euromemo Group) gave me the opportunity to draw on a few EDS authors for a paper presentation in Rome in 2014: From Dependent Industrialization to Peripheral De-Industrialization in Europe: Considerations from Development Studies. Joachim Becker and I presented a paper that attempted to bring together dependency school and regulation theory for the International Conference Research & Regulation in Paris in 2015: Changing Development Models: Dependency School Meets Regulation Theory. Also in 2015, I gave a talk at a workshop of the Arbeitskreis kritische Europaforschung in Vienna: Development Theory and SpaceQuestions of Core and Periphery in Europe (Entwicklungstheorie und Raumzu Fragen von Zentrum und Peripherie in Europa). Consequently, a first study appeared in German following discussions with Stefan Pimmer, who reloaded dependency theories together with Lukas Schmidt in a special issue for the Austrian Journal of Development Studies (Journal fr Entwicklungspolitik) in 2015: Periphere Integration und Desintegration in Europa: Zur Aktualitt der Europischen Dependenzschule. Subsequently, English versions were published in the Journal of Contemporary European Studies after all, as Peripheral Integration and Disintegration in Europe: The European Dependency School Revisited in 2017 (online) and 2018 (print).

Besides these theoretical and methodical accounts, and contributions to the history of theory, the dependency paradigm influenced empirical studies in the course leading to this book. Based on a paper presented at the 18th Conference on Alternative Economic Policy in Europe (EuroMemo Group) in Pozna, Poland, in 2012, Joachim Becker and I contributed Berlin Consensus and Disintegration: Monetary Regime and Uneven Development in the EU to a book edited by Wodzimierz Dymarski, Marica Frangakis, and Jeremy Leaman (The Deepening Crisis of the European Union: The Case for Radical Change, 2014). A paper to the conference Beyond Financial Regulation: European Industrial Policies in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis (Barcelona, Spain, 2013) led to a contribution together with Joachim Becker and Predrag etkovi: Financialization, Dependent Export Industrialization, and Deindustrialization in Eastern Europe, in a book edited by Giovanni Cozzi, Susan Newman, Jan Toporowski (Finance and Industrial Policy: Beyond Financial Regulation in Europe, 2016).

Dependent Financialization and Uneven Development. Core and Periphery in the European Integration Process (Abhngige Finanzialisierung und ungleiche Entwicklung. Zentrum und Peripherie im europischen Integrationsprozess) was published in the Austrian Journal of Development Studies (Journal fr Entwicklungspolitik) 3 (2013) authored together with Joachim Becker and Johannes Jger. Also with these two, I contributed Uneven and Dependent Development in Europe: The Crisis and Its Implications to a book edited by Johannes Jger and Elisabeth Springler (Asymmetric Crisis in Europe and Possible Futures: Critical Political Economy and Post-Keynesian Perspectives, 2015).

Research groups of Giovanni Arrighi, an author I included in the EDS, inspired studies that were integrated in the book. An earlier version of these studies was published in the Austrian Journal of Development Studies (Journal fr Entwicklungspolitik) 3/4, 2018: A Ladder Without Upper Rungs: On the Limitations of Industrial Policies in TNC Capitalism: The Case of the European Union. Preliminary studies on alternative regional policies were also published (in German language) in a special issue of the Journal Kurswechsel 2018, 2, which I edited together with Joachim Becker and Christina Plank: Crisis as Normality: Capitalism, Regions, and Uneven Development (Die Krise als Normalitt: Kapitalismus, Regionen und ungleiche Entwicklung). Also in the Journal Kurswechsel a series of articles on the current situation of Italy was published, which would be a source for the case study of Italy in this book: