Eastern Europe as an Economic World Region: Landau, Kalecki, and International Statistics in the Mid-Twentieth Century

 

The League of Nation’s idea of East Central Europe as a testing ground of the non-Western world together with the Nazi and Soviet quasi-colonial modernization projects has made East Central Europe into an object of imperial epistemologies. In this paper I would like offer a new perspective on the region by presenting East Central Europe as a subject and an actor shaping actively modern social sciences from the margins.

This paper focuses on Polish statistics and its international contributions from the early 1930s, when it constituted a key resource to discuss the fate of the so-called ‘overpopulated agrarian economies’ of East Central Europe, to the late 1940s, when it merged with the international social sciences pursued by the United Nations. It explores how Polish economists, Michał Kalecki and Ludwik Landau, created new forms of statistical and economic knowledge aiming to depict distinctiveness of East Central Europe as part of the non-Western world and its vulnerable place in the global capitalism.

More specifically, this paper deals with their two intellectual projects: Ludwik Landau's "World Economy" (1939) and Kalecki’s UN Economic World Reports (ca. 1947-1950) that mapped Eastern Europe’s shifting position in world economy. These projects, I claim, represented world as an assembly of  ‘unequal geographies’ and diverse economies that exposed predicament of the non-Western world and the need for a new international order. First, it will explain the ways in which international comparative statistics unfolded in Poland in collaboration as much as in opposition to the League of Nations and the UN expert epistemologies. Second, it will uncover the way Polish economists developed ideas about Eastern Europe as an economic world region to pursue global theories of development, international trade and global inequalities.