The Changing Ideological Justifications of Liberalism and its Socio-Economic Outcomes

Collective action against liberal economic reforms and their socio-economic outcomes (inequality, unemployment) has been the exception rather than the rule over the last decades in post-communist countries. Yet this was hardly so because those who lose most from increasing inequality welcomed it. Instead, liberal reforms were stabilised through a variety of other developments that paralleled them: nation-building, European Union enlargement, welfare spending, and, once the enlargement took place, migration from East to West. Equally important, the moral economy constructed by political and economic elites defended the contours and outcomes of liberal reforms. This elite consensus around market reforms became increasingly fragile throughout the 2000s, and has crumbled in Poland and Hungary – countries most closely associated with successful liberal reforms. A new moral economy replaced it, shaped by right-wing forces and subordinating liberal and left-wing ideas to conservative societal goals. Using programmatic documents produced by right-wing political forces and think tanks, the paper argues against using “social populism” for conceptualizing this new moral economy: the goals of its promoters are not simply winning elections through redistributive measures, but bringing about deep social change according to a highly ideologised perspective that seeks to root out the perceived injustice of both the communist and post-communist periods. The paper uses typologies of capitalism to show why this conservative moral economy is far more developed in Poland and Hungary than in some of the neighbouring countries (Czech Republic and Romania), and points out some implications for organised labour and collective action, drawing on the examples of recent trade union protests and strike threats in Poland and Hungary.