GLOBALIZATION, INTEGRATION AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE Final paper

This paper presents a case study of a subsidised investment of the TNC Flextronics in the Brno region. The case is interpreted as a post-Fordist type of interaction between an economic and political system. The efforts of the city and the state to attract the investor to the locality by investment incentives and the following state-city-TNC interaction are Schumpeterian economic interventions of the postnational workfare regime. The analysis of the scalar dimension of the interaction demonstrates the transformation of the political system in the process of scale relativization. The investigation of the key actors ’ interpretation of the environment of current capitalism reveals that their representation of capitalism is dominated by the image of globalization. Thus, a borderless global economy emerged. Localities compete with each other in order to be most favourably inserted into the global economic flow. The competition of localities may theoretically result in social dumping or welfare convergence since social standards are a