Regional Economic Development and Strategies in Post-Socialist Societies: Context, Constraints, Dilemmas, and Prospects

Restructuring and reorienting socialist economies is an integral but also deeply problematic aspect of their post-socialist transformation. 1 The full range of problems involved here emerges most clearly when one recognizes at the outset that economic activities themselves are always socially embedded and socially regulated and that they are also overdetermined by various geo-political, socio-cultural, and other non-economic factors. There are no pure market economies nor could there be. 2 This enables us to identify at least four major problem-complexes which affect economic restructuring in post-socialist conditions. First, any post-socialist transformation would involve not only structural disembedding of emergent market forces from their erstwhile state socialist straitjacket but also re-embedding them into an institutional framework which could help to regularize accumulation. Second, post-socialist economies must escape from one-sided economic dependence on their inherited links to former Comecon economies and move towards closer integration in the world capitalist system. This process is complicated by the problems involved in managing the economic (and political) disintegration of the Soviet bloc (cf. Andreff 1993) as well as the uncertainties related to major changes occurring in capitalism independently of those provoked by the Soviet collapse. 3 A third problem-complex is tied to the collapse of the bipolar security regime which emerged during the Cold War and the resulting need to build a post-socialist security order for Eurasia which recognizes various 'spheres of interest' and the legitimate security needs of the USA, West European states, and the successor states in the Soviet bloc (cf. Tökés 1991: 102-105). And, fourth, there are serious problems for any economic transformation rooted in the complex and controversial politics of post-socialist identity construction, nation-building, and state formation. It is impossible for this chapter to deal with all four sets of issues. Instead it focuses on the former Comecon (or CMEA) countries and reviews the relations between their attempts to move from state socialism to capitalism and proposals for regional economic blocs and strategies. This focus can be justified by the link between structural adjustment in post-socialist economies and the complex spatial organization of capitalist economic relations. The CMEA's collapse has broken established regional linkages in the former Soviet bloc and opened new opportunities for strategies oriented to sub-national development and/or supra-national economic integration. It has also left a legacy of interdependencies which constrain and limit the chances of successful integration into new regional economic systems. Moreover, despite current fascination with 'globalization' …