Industrial Policy and Energy Transition amidst Geoeconomic Restructuring: Perspectives from Eastern Europe

This episode features scholars who research East European countries situated on geopolitical border zones and characterized by long-term external economic dependence. Current geopolitical tensions and geoeconomic restructuring are rapidly transforming the maneuver space of local regimes. What do these positions tell us about third-country maneuvering and its limits in the current global context? How are these positions transformed in the context of global industrial restructuring? And what theoretical considerations do they highlight as necessary to grasp the potential impacts of geoeconomic transformation? To answer these questions, we are joined by several guests: David Karas proposes a regulationist framework to compare ongoing reconfigurations in the internal and international dimensions of American and European capitalism. Agnes Gagyi, Tamás Gerőcs, and Linda Szabó show how the current Hungarian regime’s geopolitical balancing supports a historic wave of reindustrialization at the intersection of German and East Asian EV and battery production chains. Nina Djukanović focuses on Serbia's resistance to lithium mining and the Western Balkans' semi-peripheral position in relation to the EU. Analyzing this in the context of the EU’s twin green and digital transitions, she offers a critique of green extractivism and growth-based solutions to climate change. Lela Rekhviashvili and Evelina Gambino examine the extractive character of infrastructure-led development and discuss how previous failures prefigure the revival of infrastructure projects, focusing on two large infrastructure projects in Georgia: the Deep Sea Port of Anaklia and Namakhvani Hydropower Plant (HPP) projects. You can read the corresponding essays on Dispatches of the Second Cold War Observatory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices