Project Description

The Junior Research Group ‘Peripheral Liberalism’ assesses the emergence of liberal scripts in countries that belonged to the socialist camp of the Cold War. It critiques a dominant Western-imposition narrative which permeates much of the literature on the ‘transition’ of socialist Eastern Europe, East Asia, and their allies in the Global South. We revisit the debates on economic and political reform in Soviet Russia, Russia’s Far East, Soviet Estonia, Hungary, Communist China, and Chile from the 1970s, focussing on historiographical evidence produced by individual economists and social scientists.

We assess how local varieties of liberal thought emerged from the late 1970s, not as a passive import, but in engagement with local intellectual traditions, domestic economic and political challenges, and interpretations of reforms abroad. This global intellectual exchange was not limited to contact with the West, but crucially included the experience and expertise of other countries of the socialist world. Our assumption is that a liberal script was laid out long before Western advisors flocked to these countries from the 1980s; it was only partially implemented around 1990, and while some of their ideas still informed economic and financial policy, the liberals themselves were soon politically side-lined.

Research Questions

The project assesses how market economists developed their ideas in decidedly illiberal political contexts. How did academics who eventually oversaw market transitions as ministers and advisors develop intellectually before they got close to political power? How did they communicate within their own academic communities, and how did they connect and debate potential reform paths within international networks? What was the impact of dominating Western economic theory on their worldview? What did they take from reform debates in non-Western countries with comparable political and economic systems? Importantly, how did they deal with their intellectual and political marginality? Which compromises were they willing to make with authoritarian regimes?

Research Approach

Key to our approach is that we rely on primary historical evidence, produced by the actors themselves and in the original languages. We consult state and security service archives in Eastern Europe and South America. In Russia and China, due to current political restrictions, we use private archives, memoir literature and qualitative interviews with economists. We also assess the numerous scholarly and journalistic publications by the economists studied in the project.

Relation to the Liberal Script

The liberal script has been contested with a particular vengeance in (former) state socialist countries. Political leaders and likeminded pundits from Hungary to Russia and China have sought political legitimacy through the explicit rejection of liberalism as a Western imposition during the turbulent transformation of the 1990s. Our approach helps critique such politically instrumentalised narratives, but also points to a tense relationship between liberalism and democracy, which in a Western-centric debate have tended to be conflated.

Current Status

We have outlined the state of research and our approach in detail in a Scripts Working Paper, and we have held two international workshops in 2022 and 2023, each leading to joint publications (one to appear with the Scripts book series with Oxford UP, the other appeared as Special Issue of ‘Russian History’).

Publications

Axe, Kevin / Rupprecht, Tobias/ Trinkle, Alice 2021: Peripheral Liberalism. New Perspectives on the History of the Liberal Script in the (Post-)Socialist World. SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 13, Berlin: Cluster of Excellence 2055 “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)”.

Trinkle, Alice 2022: The Liberal Script in the Socialist World: János Kornai and China. SCRIPTS Think Piece № 11.

Rupprecht, Tobias / Slobodian, Quinn / Plehwe, Dieter 2022: The Road from Snake Hill. The Genesis of Russian Neoliberalism, Market Civilizations, in: Slobodian, Quinn / Plehwe, Dieter (eds.) Neoliberals East and South, 109-138.

Rupprecht, Tobias 2023: The Socialist Great Divergence. Why Mikhail Gorbachev Failed Where Deng Xiaoping Succeeded, Russian History 49(2-4): 336-351.

Rupprecht, Tobias / Sahling, Cornelia 2024: Destructively Independent. The Russian Central Bank Leadership in the Runup to the 1993 Constitutional Crisis, Russian History 50(1-2): 68-88.