The Economic History of Central, East and South-East Europe

1800 to the Present

Matthias Morys, Matthias Morys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317414100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Conditions économiques

The collapse of communism in Central, East and South-East Europe (CESEE) led to great hopes for the region and for Europe. A quarter of a century on, the picture is mixed: in many CESEE countries, the transformation process is incomplete, and the economic catch-up has taken longer than anticipated.

The current situation has highlighted the need for a better understanding of the long-term political and economic implications of the Central, East and South-East European historical experience. This thematically organised text offers a clear and comprehensive guide to the economic history of CESEE from 1800 to the present day. Bringing together authors from both East and West, the book also draws on the cutting-edge research of a new generation of scholars from the CESEE region. Presenting a thoroughly modern overview of the history of the region, the text will be invaluable to students of economic history and CESEE area studies.

1
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

Matthias Morys

Introduction

The collapse of communism in Central, East and South-East Europe (CESEE) led to great hopes for the region and Europe as a whole in the early 1990s. Freed from the constraints of central planning and transformed into liberal democracies based on the rule of law, the CESEE countries would catch up quickly with their West European counterparts. Three decades on, the initial optimism has given way to a more mixed assessment. While the political transformation appears irreversible in most parts of CESEE, a relapse to more authoritarian forms of government has occurred in others. In many CESEE countries, the transformation process remains incomplete despite a superficially successful emulation of the West European prototype. This is evidenced, among others, by the encroachment on the freedom of the press and on the independence of the judiciary in some countries in the region.

Similarly, the economic catch-up process appears to take far longer than originally anticipated. Ukraine, the largest CESEE country (bar Russia), remains stuck at about 10% of British, French and German income levels.¹ Even Slovenia and the Czech Republic, arguably the two most successful transition economies, have achieved only half of the West European average income after three decades of post-communist growth. Of greater concern still is a growing sense that some of the challenges facing the eastern half of the European continent are not a communist legacy but might well be more deeply rooted. During the course of the European debt crisis (2009–2015), Greece acquired notoriety for characteristics commonly associated with other CESEE countries, such as tax evasion, lack of transparency, corruption and nepotism, yet it was the only country in the region that did not undergo the state socialist experience but remained aligned to the West during the Cold War period.

The current situation has highlighted the need for a better understanding of the long-term political and economic implications of the Central, East and South-East European historical experience. The book aims to be a clear and comprehensive guide to the economic history of CESEE from about 1800 to the present day, and it understands itself as the first quantitative economic history of Eastern Europe. It comes at a crucial juncture of historical research on CESEE. For the past 10 to 15 years, we have been witnessing a first generation of promising young scholars from the CESEE region who have obtained their PhDs at leading Western academic institutions and are keen on using new methodological approaches to understand better the historical experiences of their home countries. In tandem with this process, interest in the region has increased considerably among economic historians in Western Europe and North America and moved beyond Russia and the Soviet Union (to which Western academic interest was largely confined during the Cold War period) to include all countries in the region. Arguably, for the first time since the fall of Iron Curtain in the late 1940s, we are in a position to write a balanced and up-to-date economic history of CESEE drawing on a good mixture of junior and senior scholars from West and East.

Structure of the text and geographic coverage

The structure of this edited volume is thematic and chronological. It revolves around four themes for four distinct historical periods.

The four themes are:

1. 1 Economic growth and sectoral developments
2. 2 Economic policy
3. 3 Economic integration with Western Europe (and the rest of the world)
4. 4 Population and living standards

The four periods are:

1. 1 The “long” 19th century (1800–1914)
2. 2 The interwar period (1918–1939)
3. 3 The state socialist period (1945–1989/91)
4. 4 The transition period (1989/91 to the present)

The resulting 16 chapters (Chapters 3–18) are preceded by this introduction and a chapter offering an overview of economic development in the region before 1800 (Chapter 2). The thematic approach followed in this book is more modern than a conventional country-by-country approach. It helps to highlight common patterns of economic development, which is one of the main objectives of this edited volume.

The book covers Central, East and South-East Europe. For “Europe” we follow a geographic definition of Europe stretching to the Ural Mountains and the Bosporus in the east. If followed to the letter, this would mean (for the current period for instance) to include the European part of Russia, the Baltic countries, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine, but to exclude all other successor states of the Soviet Union.² As we are interested in the development of national economies, differentiating between the European and the Asian parts of Russia (and the Soviet Union) would be a pointless exercise. Consequently, this book refers to all of Russia (and to all of the Soviet Union) unless otherwise indicated in the text.

Reflecting a long and well-established scholarly tradition, we will distinguish between Central Europe, East Europe and South-East Europe. Central Europe refers to the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. East Europe relates to the European successor states of the Soviet Union (Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine). South-East Europe encompasses Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia. The number of independent countries on this vast land mass has increased from three (Austria, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire) to 22 over the past two centuries, and the sharp distinction between the three sub-regions has become blurred in the process. We will occasionally refer to “Eastern Europe” to avoid repetition of the acronym CESEE; in this case (“Eastern” as an adjective) we mean CESEE as a whole.

Table 1.1 shows the changing pattern of countries in Central, East and South-East Europe for the four periods we study. By the early 20th century, the number of countries had risen from three to seven after a century dominated by national independence movements in the Balkans. Greece (1821/1832), Serbia (1817/1878), Romania (1859/1878) and eventually Bulgaria (1878/1908) obtained some form of political autonomy and later full-fledged independence from the Ottoman Empire. Hence Chapters 3–6 on the 1800–1914 period will typically refer to seven countries.³ The interwar period saw the number of countries rise to 12 as a result of the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy and ...