State, capitalism and infrastructure-led development: A multi-scalar analysis of the Belgrade-Budapest railway construction

Abstract

The 2008 financial crisis allowed for the rising power of China to expand deeper into more (semi-)peripheral regions: in the past decade, the role of China and Chinese SOEs has increased markedly in Eastern Europe. This has been in step with China's geopolitical and geoeconomic expansion, hallmarked by the Belt and Road Initiative; the reconstruction of the Belgrade-Budapest railway line constitutes one of its flagship projects in Europe. This paper aims to explore the complexities of the current reconfiguration of state-capital nexus through an empirical analysis of this particular development project; in doing so, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate about the heuristic use of ‘new’ state capitalism in three specific ways. First, instead of conceptualizing the state as a territorially confined power container, we propose to scrutinize the state-capital nexus from a multi-scalar and relational perspective. Second, we claim that the study of funding, financing and governing of large-scale infrastructural investments is a fruitful analytical entry point to theorize the changing relations between ‘state’ and ‘capital’. Finally, we argue that from the perspective of contemporary shifts in global power structures, the emergence of state capitalist modalities in the Eastern peripheries of Europe should be understood as a ‘co-production’ of the geopolitical rivalry and elite capture of domains of infrastructure. In terms of methodology, in order to show how state-capital relations are produced, enacted and redrawn, the study builds on the analysis of media sources, policy documents, company networks, semi-structured interviews, and non-participant observations.