In this talk, Gábor Egry seeks answers to the question of how, following the defeat and dismantling of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918, Austro-Hungarian businesses managed to remain largely intact in the Balkans and the new nation-states that appeared in the empire’s place, despite these successor states declaring their intention to rid themselves of foreigners and the “enemy.” The persistence of Austro-Hungarian businesses, Egry argues, reveals more than the mere cunning of managers and business elites; it sheds light on three interrelated questions: 1) how Austro-Hungarian imperialism integrated South East Europe into its economic sphere; 2) the situation of this economic space, located between European and global ones; 3) how its post-WWI transformation from more direct forms of asset ownership to indirect ones created a laboratory for the financialization of capitalism.
While informal, economic imperialism is often predicated on the political power of the empires backing business actors, this backward-looking perspective highlights the crucial role of contacts with local partners, a form of embedding. In turn, embedding as the precondition of lasting success reveals the tenuous, often conflict-ridden relationship between imperial politics and imperialist economic activities, as does the cooperation with allegedly rival imperialist partners, especially in light of its intensity. Together, these links and interactions outline an economic space that is primarily non-spatial, while its secondary spatial dimensions de-center and re-center the continental economy to East and South East Europe.
Gábor Egry is a historian, a doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and director general of the Institute of Political History in Budapest. His research interests are nationalism, everyday ethnicity, the politics of identity, the politics of memory, and economic history in modern Central and Eastern Europe. He is a former István Deák Visiting Professor at Columbia University, and has also held fellowships at Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, New Europe College in Bucharest, Stanford University, and the European University Institute in Florence. Egry has written five books in Hungarian, as well as several articles for publications such as Contemporary European History, European Review of History, Slavic Review, Hungarian Historical Review, and Südost-Forschungen. He was the principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator project Nepostrans (2018-2023). He is currently working on Austro-Hungarian informal imperialism and economic space.
IWM Permanent Fellow Ayşe Çağlar will moderate the discussion.
