Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

When East European socialism collapsed in 1989-91, among its legacies were an enormous amount of industrial infrastructure. While much that was obsolete followed abruptly in the footsteps of Western Rust Belts and another portion was quickly cannibalized by market forces or mismanagement, select production sites survived the fall of planned economies to rise again as pieces of massive transnational corporate networks. This paper tells the entangled story of two such sites: Huta Katowice in Dąbrowa Górnicza, Poland, and Kryvorizhstal in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine. The former built in the 1970s on the basis of Soviet technology and the promise of ore from enormous deposits surrounding the latter, both were bought up by the Indian-owned conglomerate Mittal Steel in the 2000s (now ArcelorMittal after the company’s further expansion in Western Europe – including plants that supplied crucial imported components for both of these Eastern Bloc mills). Part of a dissertation project that focuses on East European industrial cities experiencing rapid transformation – first under state socialism and again in its aftermath – the proposed paper explores and compares shifts in management and meaning at a local level. How was being a node in an international socialist economic geography of the late twentieth century different from (or similar to) being a cog in the transnational capitalist machinery of the early twenty-first? When told through the lens of Huta Katowice, Kryvorizhstal, and ArcelorMittal, the purported ‘end of history’ sounds more like a key change in a longer opera of industrial development.