This article argues that the organisation of Euro 2012 in Poland is an extension and intensification of wider tendencies in the reconfigurations of statehood occurring in Eastern Europe. Contrary to free market mantras, the case of the Euro reveals ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ as involving a vital role for the state, but one where statehood is stretched in different, often incompatible, directions. The configurations of deregulation and reregulation involved reveal an emergent scalar hierarchy of monopoly manipulation and collusions, the outcomes of which are new patterns of spatial differentiation. The analysis of Euro 2012 helps to piece together the contradictory features of statehood as they emerge both in relation to, and as an element actively involved in, producing this configuration. Such research is important both for a view of the further transformations of statehood in Eastern Europe and also to ask what light the evolutions of statehood in Eastern Europe, as evidenced in the organisation of Euro 2012, throw on the turbulent realignments of the international configuration currently underway, particularly in terms of an ambivalent role of the notion of Europe.
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