Exploring neoliberal resilience: the transnational politics of austerity in Czechia

Abstract

Neoliberalism has been allegedly challenged in East Central Europe. The neoliberal rollback by both nationalist forces and their economic nationalism in Hungary and Poland is commonly used to confirm this regional generalisation. In this generalisation, economic nationalism promotes anti-neoliberal state strategies because it challenges the economic globalism which was formerly privileged by the neoliberal globalist forces in these strategies. This paper challenges such a generalisation. Focusing on Czechia, it counterargues against this rollback thesis by stating that neoliberalism has overcome the global economic crisis and the political crisis of its austerity management. The transnational class approach is then offered as an alternative to the rollback scholarship: contrary to the rollback thesis, Czechia illustrates how economic nationalism can also promote neoliberalism. Moreover, Czech neoliberalism remains resilient because a pragmatic coalition of two neoliberal—nationalist and globalist—forces retains an enduring influence on the country’s economic strategies. These findings cultivate the regional generalisation but contribute subsequently to the broader debate on the worldwide rollback of neoliberal globalisation due to the political rise of economic nationalism.

Politics of the Debtfare State: Repoliticizing the Czech Debt Enforcement Order and Its Limits

“…As in the case of any form of state or state strategy (Drahokoupil, 2009;Jessop, 2007;Offe and Keane, 1984), the politics of the DEO (re)inscribes a structural selectivity in this debtfare state strategy-making, which then institutionally prioritizes the interests, rights, powers, or well-being of one social group over those of others in regulating the creditor-debtor-bailiff relations. I delineate two rival types of rhetorics-the depoliticizing and repoliticizing types-which consist of either market-oriented or socially protective morals and rationalities (Mikuš, 2020;Scheiring, 2020;Šitera, 2021). This is done by tracing whether and how these types (re)inscribe either a debtfarist pro-creditor and -bailiff selectivity or challenge it in favor of a pro-debtor selectivity.…”

“…Making them regulatable, it reintegrates their deprioritized households and the emerging debt enforcement-led chain of poverty industries (Burton, 2017;Hoření Samec, 2021;Kupka et al, 2021;Stenning et al, 2010). The austerity and workfarist practices, which retrench and re-enact the welfare state as an active labor market policy (Sirovátka, 2018;Šitera, 2021;Trlifajová and Hurrle, 2019), are found particularly orthodox and key in this reintegration of the low-income labor through formal work and debt relations. I thus identify the debtfarism as co-constituted by them during the enacting of a pro-creditor debt enforcement which obliges low-income debtors to pay their debts through formal work.…”

“…Rhetorically, the Czech debtfarism legitimizes such asymmetric creditor-debtor-bailiff relations as integral to this postsocialist enactment of a normal market economy. Siding with the creditor interests and bailiff powers, the depoliticizing forces commit the state to make debts work by forcing the debtors to self-reliantly work their debts off as a form of market justice and rational economic process (Mikuš, 2020; Šitera, 2021). Regarding the state, I identify the rule of law (Soederberg, 2014: 50–52) as a foundational debtfarist rhetoric.…”

“…The middle-class mortgages remain depoliticized (Samec, 2020), which limits any broader repolitization of debtfarism within the Czech neoliberal state. Amplified by the most orthodox neoliberal crisis management in ECE (Šitera, 2021), the DEO-centered overindebtedness (Figure 1), however, opens a political opportunity for challenging the debtfarism. The new “centrist” or “technocratic” populist party (Scheiring, 2021) ANO in government and the far-right party SPD in opposition belatedly seize this opportunity in the mid-2010s.…”

“…While such a welfare state strategy complements the dominant manufacturing-led industrial strategy (Bohle and Greskovits, 2019), I explore a distinct credit-led debtfare state as another state strategy in ECE. Second, the historicization of the Czech politics of debtfare state strategy-making (Hoření Samec, 2021;Šitera, 2021) nuances both scholarships' views on the repolitization of household financialization and the overall neoliberal state in this postsocialist semiperiphery. Rather than being led solely by emancipatory (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2019;Roberts and Soederberg, 2014) or non-emancipatory (Mikuš, 2019;Scheiring, 2021) forces, I find this repolitization to be led by their contradictory coalitions and unacknowledged consensuses beyond populism.…”