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So, we do see the repercussions of what happened in East-Central Europe and the Soviet Union
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on a global scale.
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We can also start conceptualizing East-Central Europe as a node in a larger set of global
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transformations.
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You are listening to the transformative podcast brought to you by the Research Center for
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the History of Transformations at the University of Vienna.
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You're listening to an in-house edition of the transformative podcast today with me,
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Rosamund Johnston, and my colleague and superior here at RedCet, Yanis Panayiotidis, with whom
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alongside six other editors based at RedCet over the past four years, I've been working
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on the Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation.
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And today, Yanis and I would like to give you a first glimpse of that following its
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release with Routledge on the 1st of January this year.
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So Yanis, thank you very much for joining me today.
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Happy to be here.
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As someone who has been involved in this project from the very, very beginning, perhaps you
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would be best placed to talk about the conceptual foundations on which this handbook was built.
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This handbook in its whole genesis and conceptual outlook is really closely tied to RedCet
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as such, which takes this broad perspective on transformation.
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And of course, the title of the handbook already contains a thinly veiled hint at our main
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inspiration, 1989 and the Great Transformation, of course, refers to Karl Polanyi's work on
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the Great Transformation, published in 1944.
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Obviously Polanyi was not talking about the transformations we are looking at around the
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year 1989, but he provided a certain conceptual framework that he developed against the backdrop
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of the emergence and collapse of the classical liberal order in the 19th century and first
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half of the 20th century.
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There are some key mechanisms there that he identified, which are helpful for understanding
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some of the key processes in this regard.
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He called them the double movement.
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So a simultaneous movement of marketizing and protectionist forces in society, or as
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he also called it, disembedding and re-embedding forces, which on the one hand aim to impose
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the market as the main or the sole mechanism of social organization on society.
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And on the other hand, you have society resisting these trends.
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This is something that Polanyi wrote from the vantage point of someone who had seen
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liberalism collapse, who had seen the emergence of fascism as one response, but also the emergence
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of what he called embedded liberalism.
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So essentially the modern welfare state, as you could already see it emerge in the 1930s,
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United States with the New Deal, etc.
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We're talking about something that you could frame as a second Great Transformation for
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which the year 1989 is of great importance as a pivot, if you will, in a long-term development
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that we argue already started in the 1970s with the advent of neoliberalism.
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So a second coming of liberalism, so to speak, and its rise and global spread, which definitely
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reached an important point in 1989 when the socialist world collapsed.
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When we say 1989, of course, we mean 1989 till 1991 and the end of the Soviet Union.
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But basically, we're talking about the point in time when socialism, state socialism as
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the main alternative to liberal capitalism disappeared or mostly disappeared, at least
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from the European continent, and liberalism in its neoliberal guise achieved an important
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high point of its development.
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So actually, one of the things you just mentioned there was this kind of timeframe with 1989
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being crucial, but maybe not all explanatory or all encompassing in and of itself.
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And that actually leads us to kind of the four, I suppose, main takeaways that we as
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editors kind of found amassing these 40 plus chapters of the handbook that all these different
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authors were kind of pointing to, which was somewhat decentering 1989 as this crucial
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moment for understanding the dynamics of a transformation, great or otherwise, that
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took place at this time.
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As you mentioned there, the 1970s really seems to be a kind of interesting alternative starting
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point and a starting point that many of the authors to this handbook wanted to flag in
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terms of thinking through different economic ideas, in terms of political reform.
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If you decenter East Central Europe and the revolutions of 1989 and you look instead at
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Southern Europe and the kind of democratic revolutions that took place there then.
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And then if we kind of want to complicate or blur 1989, and I think there are some good
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reasons we'll discuss this further for doing so, then we also find that it maybe isn't
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this clear and sharp break in important ways that socialism and the legacies of socialism,
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the built environment, some of the thinking, some of the connections, international connections
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that had been fostered during that socialist period continue to really matter beyond this
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1989 moment and shape the, again, dynamics or contours of this great transformation that
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we see taking place in East Central Europe and beyond over these years.
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And I would say those are kind of two of the more temporal, I suppose, findings or arguments
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that we came to with this handbook.
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But maybe you want to talk about, there are a couple of spatial ones that we kind of came
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to distill and maybe you want to round up what those were and what their significance
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is.
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The spatial implications are, to some degree, of course, tied to these temporal implications.
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So by extending the timeline to the 1970s, we necessarily look beyond East Central Europe
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and we consider a global scale.
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So the rise of neoliberalism was a global development.
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It had to do with global economic trends, with the oil crisis, also with challenges
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from the decolonizing world and the guise of the new international economic order, which
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was perhaps a main contender to this emerging neoliberal order.
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And at the same time, when we talk about 1989 and what followed, it is very helpful to look
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at East Central Europe in comparison with other regions in the world where transformations
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did take place, where economic transformations in particular did take place, but perhaps
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political transformations not to the same degree.
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The main case in point here is, of course, China, which is almost like a natural experiment
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of what could have been East Central Europe transforming under capitalist auspices, but
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without the communist power giving up its grip on political power.
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This is one main comparison we have here in the handbook and also here at RATESET more
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generally.
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But of course, it's also interesting to look at other parts of the world, Latin America,
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for instance.
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We have one contribution by Rafael Pedemonte on Cuba, which, of course, was also affected
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by what happened in East Central Europe and in particular in the Soviet Union, which used
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to be the main sponsor of Cuban socialism.
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But importantly, and this is something that comes out of Pedemonte's article and already,
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once again, complicates the timeline, Cuba already had its problems with Soviet reforms
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since 1985.
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So with Perestroika, the reforms of Soviet communism within the communist system.
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So we do see the repercussions of what happened in East Central Europe and the Soviet Union
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on a global scale.
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We can also start conceptualizing East Central Europe as a node in a larger set of global
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transformations.
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East Central Europe in many ways became an important testing ground, if you will, for
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of the neoliberal ideas that were in the air at the time, which had already been applied
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to some degree in developing countries through mechanisms of structural adjustment and which
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through these transformations post 89 came back to the European continent, maybe entered
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the European continent in the first place, which then also had repercussions for not
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just for East Central Europe, but for the wider continent and the West with a capital
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W, which is a process that Philip Teer, who's the founder of Red Set and one of the editors
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of this handbook also has termed co-transformation.
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So the transformation in the East did not leave the West untouched.
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On the contrary, this then shows us how East Central Europe really occupies an important
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space in this longer trajectory from the 1970s up until the present.
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Which is so important because very often looking at or writing about East Central Europe sort
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of suggests that it is in some way an outsider to many kind of more global debates and discussions.
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And for example, some of the authors talk about transformation is often used instead
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of the term globalisation to discuss what's taking place in the 80s and the 90s in this
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region.
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And our handbook emphatically makes the argument through a range of different perspectives
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for looking at events in East Central Europe as parts of broader global processes over
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those years.
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So we kind of broke it down into eight different sections, I suppose, after saying 1989 isn't
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the be all and end all.
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We actually open the handbook with a section of articles on the significance or relative
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insignificance of the year 1989 around the globe.
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And that was edited by our colleague here Sheng Pen before then taking quite a Polanian
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structure really to thinking about the different aspects of this transformation.
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So thinking, first of all, about economic transformations edited by Anna Calori and
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societal or social transformations, which was a section I edited, kind of seeing them
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in some ways as maybe preceding the political transformations that occurred quite abruptly
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in some cases around East Central Europe in 1989 and in the Soviet Union in 1991.
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And then we also have some sections that are maybe more the strengths of RETA and not something
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that Polanyi himself focused so much on.
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So specifically, they're thinking about cultural transformations and intellectual transformations
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and then migration, which is something that RETA said we have done a great deal of research
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into.
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And it's not something that was so highly flagged by Polanyi as being a kind of important
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component of thinking about the great transformation.
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And so, I mean, I suppose I could talk a little bit more about the process, but I think that
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what might be more interesting than that is kind of what emerged as we put together these
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48 chapters over four years through a series of workshops.
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And so I don't know, Yanis, if you maybe want to talk about some of the things that became
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quite apparent that we had missed in the way that we structured this handbook and had originally
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put it together.
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Well, yes, once you've completed 550 pages of handbook, it's, of course, most fun in
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a way to think about what you didn't cover in this massive enterprise, because surprisingly
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or unsurprisingly, there are still some gaping holes, you could say, in the analysis, one
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of which is the issue of war and conflict.
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It's not completely absent, to be fair, especially to our colleagues like Jelena Djurenovic working
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on former Yugoslavia, where obviously war and the aftermath of war is absolutely crucial
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for understanding this period.
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But still, by and large, we're not talking so much about war in a self-critical perspective.
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One could say that we are perhaps operating in this post-89 mode of thinking more about
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as a, you know, the post-Cold War period as an era of peace, where we could reap the peace
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dividend, which in an academic sense would probably mean not having to talk about war,
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but talking about all these other things that we're discussing.
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Of course, this illusion has come crashing down at the very latest in February of 2022
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with the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
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I guess if you were paying attention before, it came crashing down before and perhaps one
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never had this illusion.
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But be that as it may, war and conflict certainly, if we were to redo this handbook, or if we
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had started conceptualizing it after February of 2022, would certainly play a much bigger
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role than it does now.
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A second issue that is somewhat absent is the environment, which perhaps should have
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already been more obvious to us in 2020 when we started planning and also because it was,
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of course, an important issue already for contemporaries in the 1980s.
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And I mean, there are interesting analyses that suggest that environmental degradation
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was actually one of the main factors contributing to the downfall of state socialism, which
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is with its non-sustainable economies, in a way.
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And of course, the simultaneous questions about, you know, the limits of growth as a
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fundamental challenge to the whole capitalist economic model, which we are, I guess, debating
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these days under different circumstances and with different terminologies of green transformation,
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which is something we had a festival about here at Redzet, which is not something that
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is very prominent in this handbook.
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And I guess a third issue, which is not a gap, but more like something that actually
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made it into the handbook, even though we didn't plan on it so much, is the issue of
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populism.
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This is something that came up in more than half of the contribution without us asking
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the authors to talk about it.
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And that, of course, has to do with what's happening in the region.
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It has to do with the emergence of self-declared illiberal regimes, such as Orban's government
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in Hungary, Kaczynski government in Poland, and so on.
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This is, of course, something that, if you look at it from the point of view of Polanyi's
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analysis, again, is really something that confirms how relevant his paradigm is for
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the analysis of this era, precisely because this populism or this illiberal backlash against
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neoliberal reform, but also against liberal institutions, can be understood as a counter
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movement in the Polanian sense, as a re-embedding movement, which, you know, doesn't necessarily
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mean that all these illiberal regimes aren't capitalist or anything, but it has something
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to do with sort of an entrenching of the nation, for instance, as an important frame of governance.
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And it has to do with a certain way of talking about protection of the nation, of the people,
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and so on, which finally, I think, also underscores an important point, namely that this re-embedding
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that Polanyi talks about, these protectionist forces, are not necessarily the good guys
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in history.
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You know, there is a very conservative or even reactionary element, or can be a reactionary
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element in these re-embedding movements.
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Of course, in the historical example, Polanyi also wrote about the emergence of fascism.
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So in that sense, it's no surprise that nowadays, once again, we're debating whether, you know,
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some of the current forms of governments that have emerged in different places, including
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the United States, are or aren't fascist.
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I'm always a bit skeptical with using the sort of the exact historical terms and looking
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for exact analogies and histories.
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It's more about thinking about, you know, certain structural similarities, perhaps,
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and this way, we can perhaps start developing a new vocabulary that allows us to better
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understand what is happening now.
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So you're absolutely right to bring up populism and populism as a debate, right?
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Throughout this handbook, there's not necessarily kind of one definitive answer offered to the reader.
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In fact, I would say there's a lively debate taking place across its 550 pages over whether
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populism is a helpful term, for example, to understand the current moment and whether
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it is, as you say, in this sort of Polanyi model, a kind of counter movement or some
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backlash based on some economic and social reforms that have taken place over the past
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30 or 40 years.
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And that's the other, I think, kind of important debate that comes up that I wanted to flag
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over the pages of this handbook, which is about what this transformation period is or
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was, whether it is complete, whether it is not.
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You mentioned 2022, the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine as being a kind of end
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point in some interpretations.
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That's certainly the interpretation, for example, of Philip Terr, and that would be the argument
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of Nino Aivazishvili-Gaynor and Ilona Grabmeier, also that this is a moment which has now closed.
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But also you'll find in these pages, Ned Richardson Little and Felix Jiménez-Botta, for example,
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talking about human rights and 1989 being this high point, right?
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And ultimately, really the end of that kind of human rights, having a great moral authority
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and a great kind of chance to, what should I say, shape the thinking of meaningful political
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alternatives that they've been deployed ever since, but with dwindling returns.
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So I think, you know, the handbook is full of debates specifically to do with periodization.
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However, I think we can go beyond saying we complicate issues, and it is complicated,
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towards saying that maybe one of the findings we have is that transformation taking place
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at different tempos, in different places, or perhaps indeed even within the same space.
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For example, if we look at the very local level, which my chapter does a little bit,
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at sort of different privatized parts of the same state-owned enterprise, for example.
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So I think those would be the kind of early takeaways that we as editors might suggest
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you can look forward to in the handbook.
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So with those questions open rather than closed, we invite you very much to read the handbook,
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and thank you very much for listening to this sneak preview of it on the Transformative Podcast.
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Join us next time for another episode.
