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The Political Economy of Post-Communism: The Donbas and Upper Silesia in Transition
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This book is about the first twenty years of post-communist transformation in the Donbas (Ukraine) and Upper Silesia (Poland), the two largest industrial regions of Eastern Europe. It exposes a dramatic increase in inequality and poverty, persistently high levels of unemployment and of criminal and self-destructive behaviour, which have all characterised Upper Silesia’s transition to capitalism. This study also shows how the Donbas population has suffered from a steep decline in living conditions and a sharp deterioration of healthcare and human development standards. Based on original primary data, this book stresses the detrimental impact on regional restructuring of the inherited structural liabilities and exogenous shocks emanating from the collapse of state socialism. The study’s main argument, however, is that what determines the eventual outcome of transformation is not so much the legacy of the communist (or even pre-communist) past or the extent of neoliberalisation, but the success which a society has in moulding its major institutions – both inherited from state socialism and those copied from modern capitalism – in a complementary, reciprocally sustaining manner.
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... Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Donbas has suffered a devastating economic transition, plunging-alongside Ukraine-to the bottom of the world's human survival and development indicators. Overall, Ukraine's post-Soviet development was characterised by the deepest and longest economic depression experienced by any of the post-communist transition economies not affected by war, resulting in the loss of 60% of the gross domestic product (GDP) between 1990 and 1999 (Mykhnenko 2011). The impact of national economic decline on Donbas's economic fortunes was profound, accelerating the region's long-term demographic crisis. ...
... Whilst acknowledging the dangers of Ukraine's diverging spatial economy, one ought to distinguish between what Wilson (2016, p. 641) called 'baseline separatism', existing in many regions across the world, and a much more explicitly anti-Ukrainian economic interests-based 'master cleavage'. Most importantly, as previous studies testify (Mykhnenko & Swain 2010;Mykhnenko 2011), the areas over which the Ukrainian government lost control in 2014-2015 had never possessed a distinctively different industrial structure, which could have made them especially susceptible to an armed separatist rebellion in comparison with the neighbouring areas of eastern Ukraine. For some reason, Zhukov (2016) did not extend his municipality-level analysis to other heavily industrialised, coal-mining, steelmaking and machine-building east Ukrainian towns in neighbouring Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipropetrovsk provinces. ...
This essay provides an economic geography perspective on the causes and consequences of the war in eastern Ukraine. It focuses on the controversial proposition that the armed conflict in 2014 was triggered by domestic, economically determined factors. The essay argues that economic and material circumstances in the region had generated neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a locally rooted, internally driven armed conflict. The role of the Kremlin’s military intervention was paramount for the commencement of hostilities. As the human and economic costs of the war continue to mount, Ukraine’s war-ravaged eastern regions face further depopulation, economic decline and erosion of development.
... When Ukraine became independent in 1991, its economyespecially the Soviet industrial regionssuffered a devastating economic decline and experienced an extremely slow and painful transition to the new market economy. According to Vlad Mykhnenko (2011), 'Ukraine's post-Soviet development was characterised by the deepest and longest economic depression experienced by any of the post-communist transition economies not affected by war, resulting in the loss of 60 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) between 1990 and 1999'. These transformations were especially painful for the Donbas region and its population, and they created perfect conditions for the resurrection of 'the great Donbas' myth and for Soviet (specifically Soviet-Ukrainian) nostalgia, which was used by the local elite to mobilise their political supporters. ...
This Element offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people's sense of belonging. It begins with an examination of the brief historical and socio-demographic profiles of Crimea and the Donbas, stages of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, main explanatory frameworks as presented in the scholarly literature and policy reports, with a critical re-evaluation of identity-based explanations, and the directions of conflict-driven displacement flows. It examines state failures and the role of internal displacement governance in shaping new lines of social inclusion or exclusion through the production of multiple physical, symbolic and bureaucratic borders. It discusses Ukraine's civil society response to IDP dislocation and IDPs' engagement through various formal and non-formal networks. The final section explores the multidimensional and complex (dis)connections that IDPs experience with regard to their imagined past, their new places of residence and the social groups perceived as important in their hierarchies of belonging. Link to google books: https://books.google.de/books?hl=de&lr=&id=x6XKEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1989&dq=info:KHnJ5gFq4iIJ:scholar.google.com/&ots=8Jc4spSOWd&sig=9CvgLo8E8k2Q79S7f-nyirVzoUI&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
... With the crisis of capitalist massproduction system in the West in the late 1970s, and industrial restructuring that followed, the modern Turkish state has increasingly come to rely on market-led economic development policies (Birch & Mykhnenko, 2010). The shift towards neoliberal economic policies worldwide has had a severe effect on costly underground coal production in wider Europe (Özatağan & Eraydin, 2020; see also Mykhnenko, 2011). ...
This policy brief introduces a successful solution to convert Zonguldak, a peripheral shrinking city in north-western Turkey, into a compact and connected urban area. Amongst many promising initiatives, recently identified by the local stakeholders, Zonguldak Harbour (Coastal Area) Recreation Project has been put forward as the exemplar of sustainable urban development, improved accessibility, and connectivity. This project, initiated by Zonguldak Governorship in 2012, is aimed at redeveloping the heavily industrialised coastal strip of Zonguldak for leisure, sports, recreation, and entertainment. The first implementation phase (2016-2018) involved drawing spatial design and architectural plans for the redevelopment of the coastal strip around Zonguldak harbour, cleaning up the harbour area, and demolishing unregistered buildings that were illegally constructed on public land. Zonguldak’s harbour redevelopment has been a transformational project that is changing the image of the city from a polluted coal-mining hub to a more liveable municipality, with attractive public amenities and recreational facilities. The key lesson learnt is that collaborative efforts of local stakeholders are imperative not only for favourably shifting the public perception of a shrinking city but also for giving its local inhabitants a sense of attachment, belonging, and pride.
... Secondly, Makiivka was hit hard by several waves of deindustrialization. Starting as a 'slow-burn' decline of the krainian Donbas coalfields in the 1970s, the city's economic decline was propelled by the 'sudden shock' of the collapse of the USSR, and 'the shock therapy' of the postcommunist economic transition [Mykhnenko, (2011); for a discussion of exogenous shocks, see Lee (forthcoming)]. During the tumultuous 1990s Makiivka lost 73% of its industrial production; even after almost a decade of growth in the 2000s, at the beginning of the 2008 financial and economic crisis, Makiivka's industrial output was still two thirds below its pretransition level of 1990 (Swain and Mykhnenko, 2007). ...
Since the second half of the 20th century, urban shrinkage has become a common pathway of transformation for many large cities across the globe. Although the appearance of shrinkage is fairly universal-typically manifested in dwindling population, emerging vacant spaces, and the underuse of existing urban infrastructure, ranging from schools and parks to water pipelines-its essence is hidden from view. Phenomena related to shrinkage have been discussed predominantly using terms such as decline, decay, blight, abandonment, disurbanization, urban crisis, and demographic change. Amongst others, these concepts were typically related to specific national contexts, installed in distinct explanatory frameworks, based around diverging normative accounts, ultimately leading to very different policy implications. Yet there is still a lack of conceptualization and integration of shrinkage into the wider theoretical debates in human geography, town and country planning, urban and regional studies, and social sciences at large. The problem here is not only to explain how shrinkage comes about, but also to study shrinkage as a process: simultaneously as a presupposition, a medium, and an outcome of continually changing social relationships. If we wish to understand shrinkage in a specific location, we need to integrate theoretical explanations with historical trajectories, as well as to combine these with a study of the specific impacts caused by shrinkage and to analyse the policy environment in which these processes take place. The authors apply an integrative model which maps the entire process across different contexts and independently of local or national specifics; it covers causes, impacts, responses, and feedback loops, and the interrelations between these aspects. The model does not 'explain' shrinkage in every case: instead, it builds a framework into which place-specific and time-specific explanations can be embedded. It is thus a heuristics that enables communication, if not comparison, across different contexts. With the help of this model, the authors hope to find a way in which shrinkage can be studied both in a conceptually rigorous and in an historically specific way. Instead of an invariant 'process of shrinkage', they portray a 'pluralist world of shrinkages'.
The article compares the role of tripartism during and after democratic transitions in Spain and Poland. In both countries it emerged after a negotiated transition from dictatorship, but it was poorly institutionalised. While it fell short of 'neocorporatist' levels of governance, it had a 'foundational' function in stabilising both political and economic transitions, and despite its limitations, it endured for decades in the frequent, if unregular, practice of negotiating 'social pacts'. The comparison reveals some striking similarities despite the contrasting economic systems of origin, and identifies some structural constants in the evolution of post-democratic tripartism, up to the recent crisis. Introduction Tripartism has historically emerged as a response to social crisis, and in particular at times of democratic change; its main international expression and promoter, the International Labour Office (later Organisation [ILO]) was created in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I and revolutions in Russia, Germany and Hungary, at a time of conflict-ridden establishment of democracies in a number of European countries. Tripartism is intended here to mean any 'system of cooperation in economic and industrial policy between government and the peak organisations representing the two sides of industry'. 1 This is often associated with corporatism as a model of governance that, in the words of Schmitter, tries to reconcile a polity where power is supposed to belong to the majority, and an economy where power is in the hands of a minority. 2 Nonetheless, most studies of tripartism have focused on countries where it became established over a long period of consolidated democracy, especially in Scandinavia, and on the economic coordination function, rather than on the political ones. 3
The picture of the securities exchanges and financial sectors of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is still relatively unfavorable. In comparison with their Western counterparts, CEE securities exchanges, with the sole exception of the Warsaw Stock Exchange, are underdeveloped and less important to the domestic economies in general and to corporate finance in particular. Under pressure for several reasons, CEE securities exchanges should change their form of (international) organization to ensure future success. Stronger international integration of the exchanges could also improve the integration of CEE companies into international capital markets.