Domesticating Neo-Liberalism

Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities

Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská, Dariusz Świątek

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444391312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Humangeographie

Based on in-depth research in Poland and Slovakia, Domesticating Neo-Liberalism addresses how we understand the processes of neo-liberalization in post-socialist cities.

• Builds upon a vast amount of new research data
• Examines how households try to sustain their livelihoods at particularly dramatic and difficult times of urban transformation
• Provides a major contribution to how we theorize the geographies of neo-liberalism
• Offers a conclusion which informs discussions of social policy within European Union enlargement

Chapter One

Domesticating Neo-Liberalism and the Spaces of Post-Socialism

Domesticating Neo-Liberalism

In February 2004, three months before Slovakia was due to join the European Union, the Slovak government mobilized 20,000 extra police and 1,000 soldiers to quell a revolt by members of the Roma community in the east of the country. The revolt involved, primarily, the looting of basic provisions from food stores and was a reaction to the dramatic scaling back of the social welfare system. As the then Minister for Labour, the Family and Social Affairs and architect of a radical overhaul of the social assistance system, L’udovít Kaník, was quoted as saying ‘Cuts in benefits are needed to end a culture of dependence among Roma’ (Burgermeister, 2004). This series of events emerged out of a much larger-scale state initiative, which originated in the political economy of the collapse of state socialism in 1989 and intensified after the 1998 election of a centre-right coalition government, to dramatically overhaul the nature of political and economic life, modelled strongly on neo-liberal principles (Smith & Rochovská, 2007; Fisher, et al., 2007). The events of February 2004 represented, then, part of a popular reaction against neo-liberalism, which culminated in the election – after eight years of neo-liberal policies – of a more centre-left coalition government in June 2006.

Three years after these events in Slovakia, in the summer of 2007, ‘Poland . . . witnessed one of the biggest waves of social protests in healthcare in many years’ (Czarzasty, 2007) – the so-called ‘white protests’ – as thousands of Polish nurses and doctors expressed in different ways their own discontent with the neo-liberalization of Poland’s health care sector. After weeks of strikes (Warsaw Voice, 20 June 2007), a demonstration outside the Prime Minister’s chancellery suffered a disproportionate response from the authorities as nurses, doctors and their supporters were attacked by riot police. Refused a meeting with the Prime Minister, four of the nurses’ leaders launched a sit-in of the chancellery and some 1,500 of their supporters camped out in solidarity in nearby Lazienki Park, creating the so-called ‘White Village’, a ‘tent city’ with kitchens, lectures, clinics and its own newspaper, which was maintained for over four weeks, with the support of miners, steelworkers and others who shared the nurses’ concerns. These protests emerged against a backdrop of repeated strikes and protests (Stenning & Hardy, 2005) through which nurses, in particular, contested ongoing reforms to the health sector. Their particular concerns were ‘inadequate financial expenditure on the public healthcare system in general and . . . insufficient pay levels in particular’ (Czarzasty 2007), which their leaders argued resulted from the commercialization of the health service, and the creation of health care funds which introduced internal markets into health care provision. These – and the chronic underfunding which ensued – were, in turn, the result of pressures to reduce government debt, in the hope of Poland’s entry into the Eurozone. In contrasting ways, then, the nurses’ protests of summer 2007 echoed the earlier contestation of neo-liberalization in Slovakia, and a growing wave of concern about its effects across East Central Europe (ECE).

The key elements of the reforms contested by the Slovak Roma and the Polish health care workers – benefits cuts, attacks on ‘dependence’, public sector rationalization, fiscal austerity – sit at the heart of the project of neo-liberalism. Indeed, the ‘transition’ from communism to capitalism in ECE represents perhaps one of the boldest experiments with neo-liberal ideas in the world today, demonstrating vividly the policies and practices associated with this market-led ideology.¹ The project of neo-liberalism (or neo-liberalization), as we discuss in more detail in Chapter Two, rests on a theory of political economy which promotes markets, enterprise and private property, restructures regulation into more limited forms, and reduces the role of the public sector and welfare (Harvey, 2005; Peck & Tickell, 2002; Larner, 2003; J. Clarke, 2004). But it is more than a political-economic project; neo-liberalization is a social project too. It is predicated on a rejection of ‘society’ and on a promotion of the individual – most particularly, the entrepreneurial self (du Gay, 1996) – and of an idealized notion of the family. Neo-liberalism remakes the familial spaces of the household and of social reproduction as it remakes the economy. In all of these ways, the neo-liberal projects adopted and struggled over around the world have very real and often negative consequences, especially for the poor, the socially excluded and the marginalized (Smith et al., 2008a).

Domesticating Neo-Liberalism examines the remaking of household economic practices and social reproduction in Poland and Slovakia in the context of these neo-liberal transformations. In short, it asks how Polish and Slovak households work to ensure that their basic needs for income, housing, food and care are met as wider political economies are neo-liberalized. Through this focus, Domesticating Neo-Liberalism seeks to understand how the processes of neo-liberalization are promoted, received, lived, negotiated and resisted in Poland and Slovakia.

In order to explore the articulations between everyday economic practices, social reproduction and the construction of neo-liberal worlds, we take inspiration from Creed’s (1998) argument that state socialism could only be understood within the context of its domestication, as it was negotiated, constituted and made possible through the practices of everyday life and social reproduction. For Creed, domestication involves envisioning ‘big’ political-economic projects not simply as ‘out there’ and all-powerful, but as always already particular, domestic, and local phenomena too.

Building on Creed (1998) and others who work with the notion of domestication (see Chapter Three), we intertwine two versions of domestication. On the one hand, we explore the ways in which politicians, academics, think tanks and social institutions at the national, regional and international scales have ‘domesticated’ the dissemination of neo-liberal policies in Poland and Slovakia in ways which query the idea of neo-liberalism as a singular, top-down political-economic project. This perspective builds on accounts of neo-liberalism that characterize it as a geographically differentiated, locally complex process (invariably called ‘neo-liberalization’) (Barnett, 2005; Castree, 2006; Harvey, 2005; Larner, 2003; Leitner et al., 2007; Smith et al., 2008; Ward & England, 2007).

On the other hand, we read neo-liberalism as a process that is domesticated not only by the actions of national elites but also by the everyday economic practices of individuals, households and communities. This interpretation follows Creed (1998) more closely and presents domestication as an everyday and ongoing set of practices that at times destabilizes neo-liberalism but at other times articulates the neo-liberal with its others. As a result, domestication entails much more than explicit attempts at resistance, as Creed (1998: 3) explains in the context of socialism:

By simply doing what they could to improve their difficult circumstances, without any grand design of resistance, villagers forced concessions from central planners and administrators that eventually transformed an oppressive, intrusive system into a tolerable one. In short, through their mundane actions villagers domesticated the socialist revolution.

In Domesticating Neo-Liberalism, this second reading itself folds in three key claims. We argue that a focus on the mundane practices of economic life enables a detailed understanding of how neo-liberalism is understood, negotiated, contested and made tolerable in homes, communities and workplaces; how neo-liberalism is lived in articulation with a host of economic, political and social others; and how those practices are themselves involved in the remaking of neo-liberalism.

Domesticating Neo-Liberalism, then, connects two interrelated concerns. Empirically, we are concerned to document and explain the ‘violence of the economy’ (Pickles, 2004b; see also Žižek, 2006, 2008) in post-socialist East Central Europe and to build an account of the ways in which Polish and Slovak households have negotiated – or domesticated – the dislocations and exclusions that have emerged since 1989. Conceptually, we seek to employ these analyses of ‘domestication’ to think again about neo-liberalism in general and its post-socialist form in particular, by considering how neo-liberalism has been made and remade in Poland and Slovakia, at a variety of scales from national policy debates, through the work of think tanks, firms and charities, to the household and individual.

The research for this book took place in 2005 and 2006, before the global economic crisis of 2008/9, which has begun to transform neo-liberalism and the landscape of global economic policy-making in important ways. As we discuss more fully in the concluding chapter, the extent and nature of these transformations and their impact on both national political economies and everyday economic practices in Poland and Slovakia remains an open question.

Post-Socialism

In the Polish and Slovak contexts, which form the focus of Domesticating Neo-Liberalism, these analyses of both the particular policy circuits and environments as well as the lived experiences of neo-liberalism demonstrate the importance of both the legacies of socialism and the particular political economies of the post-1989 period. Thus, we also explore the particularities of post-socialist neo-liberalism, seeking to understand the difference that post-socialism makes to the processes of neo-liberalization.

Since the collapse of state socialism, debates about post-socialism have been centred in large part on the discursive power and political economy of neo-liberalism. While the early debates revolved around the distinction between ‘shock therapy’ and ‘gradualism’ (Sachs, 1990; Popov, 2000, 2007; see also Chapter Two), the perceived ‘failure’ of the state to effectively manage political-economic life refracted earlier concerns over state intervention and the likelihood for some that it would lead to a ‘road to serfdom’ (Hayek, 1994; for a critical review, see Peck, 2008). Different models of economic transformation emerged across the region, but each was committed in various ways to neo-liberalism: to the primacy of market relations; to the establishment of the social relations of capitalism based on private production, appropriation and redistribution of the economic and social surplus; to re-configurations of property ownership relations and class power; to a transformation of the state in the support of the development of market economies and capitalist social relations; and to the establishment of an ethic and subjectivity of individual responsibility. This ‘transition culture’ (Kennedy, 2002) left little space for debate or for alternatives. Policy prescriptions were frequently teleological, modernizing and reductionist (see Chapter Two) and placed an overwhelming emphasis on the changes that needed to be implemented for the post-socialist states to reach the ‘standards and performance norms of advanced industrial economies’ (EBRD, 1996: 11–12; see also Smith, 2002b; Stenning & Bradshaw, 1999). To meet these norms, four ‘pillars’ were identified – privatization, stabilization, liberalization and internationalization – whose correct and successful implementation would lead, it was argued, to the emergence of a market economy. This orthodox prescription sits within the wider notion of the ‘Washington Consensus’ (Williamson, 1990; Stiglitz, 2002), derived from the policies of international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). In these ways, the ‘transition to capitalism’ in ECE has been experienced as a thoroughly neo-liberalizing process. However, as we explore here in detail, the neo-liberal transition has been articulated with a host of ‘others’, economic and social relations which were not reducible to the market but were connected to it in complex ways (Smith & Stenning, 2006; Smith & Rochovská, 2007).

As the 1990s progressed, and as the policy focus shifted away from establishing the building blocks of market capitalism across the region, the possibility of wider geo-political and geo-economic integration with the European Union (EU) further consolidated a commitment to the primacy of capitalist and neo-liberal social relations (Gowan, 1995; Rainnie et al., 2002a; Smith, 2002b). The EU had, of course, by this time – following the introduction of the single currency, the extension of the single market and the Lisbon agenda on competitiveness – become thoroughly committed to a neo-liberal framework, despite the attempt to balance this with a continuing commitment to social cohesion. The prospect of EU membership and the imposition of the aquis communautaire (the European Community’s complete legislative framework) enabled a process of West–East policy transfer. In this way, policies to secure the primacy of the market and the legal basis for competition policy were adopted across the candidate countries as the basis for approval of their accession to the Union. Such was the power of this discursive and material framing of neo-liberal transformation in the run-up to EU enlargement that several commentators argued that accession represented the effective end of ‘post-socialism’ as the countries of the region became ‘normalized’ into the European family of nations (for a critique, see Stenning & Hörschelmann, 2008).

The notion of domestication, and the attention we draw to other sets of social relations that articulate with neo-liberalism, echo a conceptualization of post-socialism which is marked by a diversity of social forms, by continuity and change, and by an appreciation of the ways in which ‘actually existing’ state socialism continues to reverberate through the cultural and political economy of ECE (Stenning & Hörschelmann, 2008). As Hann et al. (2002: 10) suggest, ‘the everyday moral communities of socialism have been undermined but not replaced’, such that the experiences of post-socialism continu...