Cohesion Policy in Europe’s Rich Central Region: A Double Movement in the Making?

The reform of the European Union’s cohesion policy for the 2014-2020 programme period took place in the context of a profound sense of economic and financial crisis. In light of the responses put in place with these crises such as controls on the banking sector, Karl Polanyi’s notion of the double movement – the re-embedding and reorientation of marketization in the broader sociopolitical sphere and its associated institutions – has gained much popularity among concerned scholars. Although it is acknowledged that these crises have an impact on cohesion policy, Polanyian interpretations have so far failed to appear in corresponding scholarly work, which is surprising given cohesion policy’s gradually more pronounced market orientation. The objective of this paper is to address this lacuna. First, it provides an overview of the evolution of cohesion policy in the EU’s rich central regions (Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands and Denmark) with a focus on changes between the previous and current programming periods. Second, it outlines the ways in which Polanyi’s double movement has been applied elsewhere and how it could inform an understanding of cohesion policy making; specifically, the paper examines evidence of “enlightened reactionaries” attempting to re-embed neoliberal policy making so as to avoid growing regional divergence. Third, the paper takes a critical look at the notion of “place-based development”, which has come to broadly symbolize EU cohesion policy, identifying the ways in which the notion mitigates, or exacerbates the problems it seeks to address. The paper concludes with a Polanyian interpretation of current cohesion policy trends, recontextualizing them in the case of the EU’s rich central regions.