| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
THIS COLLECTION EXPLORES HOW NEOLIBERAL IDEOLOGY-and related economic policies-have been implemented in the once-socialist countries of East Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. Specifically, it argues that this ideology undergoes deep modifications as it meets post-socialist conditions: sometimes it is creatively appropriated, sometimes resisted and sometimes 'purified' (in that it is implemented more thoroughly than in the Western nations where neoliberalism as an ideology was developed). Thus, the collection illustrates how 'actually existing neoliberalism', to use Brenner and Theodore's (2002) terminology, occurs 'on the ground'. It argues that the 'actually existing neoliberalisms', which have developed in a variety of post-socialist contexts, can differ profoundly from the theoretical constructs propagated by neoliberalism's supporters, including the major international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. As recent literature on policy mobility makes clear 'It is already widely recognized that it is rarely possible to transfer policies directly, precisely because they emerge from and are responses to particular "local" sets of social and political conditions which are not replicated in the places to which they are transplanted' (Cochrane & Ward 2012, p. 5).
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