Routine failure in Macedonia: a critique of the Global Financial Crisis from the periphery

Abstract

In most Western analyses, the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) constituted a systemic failure that spread across the entire capitalist system from the United States. That was not, however, the discourse that circulated in (and about) Macedonia – a peripheral country that had been mired in economic disasters since its transition from socialism. Local experts and citizens believed that Macedonia had not been severely impacted by the GFC. This essay asks how economic crises and their aftermaths are experienced and evaluated when they are effectively routine or ‘normal’. Overall, it argues that, in a landscape punctuated by continual disruption, the GFC appeared not as a failure, but as a new reconfiguration of power that strengthened the position of new elites through increasingly oppressive relations of (inter)dependence.