The political economy of advanced semi-peripherality: East-Central Europe’s (neo-)dependency in global comparative perspective

This article advances dependency theory by rethinking the place of East-Central Europe (ECE) within contemporary global hierarchies of development. Its contribution to the revitalized neo-dependency literature is threefold. First, it reclassifies ECE as a consolidated, developmentally mobile semi-periphery that has achieved strong sectoral upgrading across both manufacturing and high-tech services. Second, it demonstrates that this upgrading is inseparable from the EU integration regime: regulatory harmonization, fiscal transfers, and legal embedding in the Single Market generate developmental dynamics that thinner or more transactional arrangements cannot replicate, making the structure of external anchoring a key explanatory variable. Third, by situating ECE in a systematic global comparison with semi-peripheries across Asia, Latin America, as well as with Europe’s non-EU neighborhood, it shows that pessimistic structuralist dependency perspectives require further revision. From these vantage points, the article outlines a research agenda connecting the revitalized comparative dependency literature with the ECE political economy scholarship.