Governing Uneven and Dependent Development: The Case of EU Cohesion Policy in East-Central Europe

This paper has two – theoretical and empirical – contributions. First, I argue that the critical International Political Economy (IPE) scholars must take the European Union´s Cohesion Policy and its Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) seriously when interpreting the uneven and dependent development in the EU´s core-peripheral relations. Understanding the policy as a Marshall-plan-type framework, which redistributes the ESIF transfers from the EU´s North-Western core states to its Eastern and Southern peripheral states, this critical scholarship can more convincingly discuss the variegated reproduction of Europe´s political asymmetries and economic inequalities. Second, I foreground the East-Central European peripheral development which is mostly analysed as dependent on the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows mainly from North-Western cores. I empirically explore how the EU and more particularly European Commission has legitimized the FDI dependency through complementing it with the so-far underresearched ESIF depedency in the ECE states´ development or catch-up strategies. Two contributions follow. The critical IPE viewpoint is nuanced with the empirical case of Cohesion Policy while offering its new interpretation of how this policy asymmetrically co-opts the peripheral states into sustaining their FDI-led economic integrations. This can then explain to the broader research how the ESIF depedency intensified the political convergence on such FDI-led catch-up strategies in the 2000s, and how it has softened the region´s rise of economic nationalism and its anti-FDI tendencies since the 2010s.