Programme

Recent scholarship has broadly investigated the global impact of the 1970s crises as a backlash of the energy shocks in both East and West, the reconfiguration of the relationship between politics and economics in the US and Western Europe, as well as the crisis of “real socialism” and the subsequent transitions to multi-party and market systems in East-Central and South-Eastern Europe. Several important works have underscored the rise of “neoliberalism” as a key category in understanding the processes of globalization stemming from the critical transformations of the 1970s and playing out up to the economic and financial crisis of 2008. This workshop will deal with those left-wing intellectuals and scholars who engaged themselves in public debates and network-building activities aimed at finding reformminded solutions to the late- and post-Cold War challenges. The papers will account for a selected number of case studies involving Europe beyond the East/West divide and including those investigated by the organizers (Italy, Hungary, and Yugoslavia). These contributions are expected to highlight the heterogeneous spectrum of “third ways”, as well as languages and perspectives of market-oriented reforms, variously (and sometimes contradictorily) intertwining socialism and liberalism. One of the main scopes of the workshop is thus to unpack the concept of “neoliberalism” as a comprehensive, but somewhat too abstract and essentialist term, while avoiding any form of deterministic approach to “neoliberal Europe”. Another scope is to place the 1989-1992 transitions into historical perspective, considering them as the unpredictable and unpredicted local outcomes of the globalizing processes and of policies of reform (or lack thereof).