Neo-Colonial Revaluation and (Self)Disciplining of Post-Socialist EU Citizens

The current transnational economy is characterized by increasing marketization that comprises of the geographical and areal intensification of price-based competition, the move from production to extraction, social dumping practices and increasing exit strategies of workers. This paper particularly addresses the intertwinement between the latter two in order to explore how different types of mobilities participate in the re-valuation and (self)disciplining of migrant workers’ subjectivities and in creation of unequal economic and symbolic geographies. By focusing on various actors and by contextualizing post-socialist central and eastern European labour migration within a broader scale and history the paper demonstrates that the movement of ideas, capital, services and goods from the West to the East was a form of neo-colonialism that acted to construct the competitive advantage also by lowering the value of post-socialist EU accession countries and their citizens. These neocolonial relations resulted in changed and deteriorated labour and living standards and rights that effectively (self)disciplined workers and informed their exit strategies. This paper thus exposes how various self-interested market participants evoke and re-shape colonial, racist and patriarchal traditions in order to gain competitive advantage on a transnationalised market and enable the expansion of marketizing logic to areas, regions and subjects that were previously sheltered by market pressures.