Description
The 2020-2021 EBRD Transition Report is a remarkable document. The cover featured a cartoon graphic of a faceless ‘Eastern European’ ‘babcia’ looming over the happy populace of an indistinct city scape as if Godzilla was destroying it. If the cover lacked clarity the report’s subtitle explained it more clearly: The state strikes back. The threat is the historical aberration of the state socialist period, the ultimate justification for reducing the state’s role.
The paper utilises the collective organic intellectual framing to analyse the EBRD’s role in the recent re-legitimisation of state intervention. The paper analyses the ongoing contradictions between the historically stated position and the EBRD’s own recent developing perspective on the new state capitalism.
The papers unfolds across four sections. First, I frame the role of the collective organic intellectual in the global political economy. Section two focuses on the changing theorisations of the withdrawal of the state in post-communist transition. The third section shows how the debate has shifted from the withdrawal of the state to the new state capitalism across an extended historical period. The final section on the 2020-21 Transition Report analyses how and why this report amplifies a set of perceived threats to successful transition.
