Re-Politicizing Embedded Neoliberalism: Shifting Patterns of EU-Integration and Dependency in the Visegrád States

Focusing on the critical Hungarian case, this paper analyses the fate of embedded neoliberal capitalism in the Visegrád countries in the wake of the global financial crisis. The changes include policies to combat foreign dominance in the financial, energy, and retail sectors, and efforts to reform and retrench the hitherto relatively generous welfare state. Nevertheless, the article finds no less evidence of continuity than of change: the politicization of fighting dependency is combined with the quiet politics of subsidizing manufacturing FDI, and the noisy politics of protecting pensioners and middle-class families parallels the erosion of future-oriented social investment. Notwithstanding the radical turn in development ideology, the actual path-correction merely shifted the pattern of dependency without breaking out of it: financing socio-economic development in Hungary (like in other Visegrád states) is still largely dependent on foreign sources, albeit of a more diversified nature, including not only manufacturing FDI, but lately the EU’s structural funds and migrant labor’s remittances as well.