THREE DECADES AFTER. ADVANCING CAPITALISM AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION OF ROMANIA’S SEMI-PERIPHERALITY
THREE DECADES AFTER. ADVANCING CAPITALISM AND THE (RE)PRODUCTION OF ROMANIA’S SEMI-PERIPHERALITY

Summary/Abstract: The article elaborates upon the production of Romania’s semi-peripherality at the intersection of long-durée dependency, uneven development, Eastern enlargement, and imperial politics, while addressing the advancement of capitalism not as a purely economic endeavour, but as a process of political subjection. It discusses the particular status of Romania in contemporary global capitalism by analysing the broader context of (1) a semi-periphery country subjected to a long-durée dependency; (2) uneven development underlay by imperial politics as endemic feature of the neoliberal European Union; (3) ‘Eastern enlargement’ and its economic conditionalities; (4) unevenness in the EU in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. As its conclusion, the article notes that in the past three decades, each of these components had a productive (material or symbolic) function in the reproduction of Romanian’s semi-peripherality as part of capitalism’s advancement in the new Millennium.

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