Trajectories of Entropy and "the Labour Question" : The Political Economy of Post-communist Migration in the New Europe

This article begins by outlining the global historical context of contingent neoliberalism which has emerged in the late twentieth century as the dominant alternative economic trajectory to that of corporatist liberal welfare capitalism. Our analysis connects contemporary dimensions of labour migration and the challenges of economic development. It is relevant to the understanding of contemporary developments in Central and Eastern Europe in that we locate a case study of labour migration from the Baltic State of Latvia as an outcome of the application of the trajectory of neoliberalism that more widely now threatens to dismantle Jacques Delors’ “Social Europe” model. We argue that in the new post-communist EU member states such as Latvia, such socioeconomic prescriptions based on a “low road” of poor labour standards fail to deliver sustainable development for those who have adopted this path. This is an electronic version of an article published in:Charles Woolfson and Jeffrey Sommers, Trajectories of Entropy and "the Labour Question": The Political Economy of Post-communist Migration in the New Europe, 2008, Debatte, (16), 1, 53-69.Debatte is available online at informaworldTM: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09651560801987187Copyright: Taylor and Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/default.as