Strategic coupling in the European (global?) periphery: Debrecen as an emerging location of the automotive industry

This paper is focused on strategic coupling processes of automotive production networks and in the European (semi-)periphery through the lens of the cultural political economy. Adopting the case study approach and a combined methodology (interviewing, analysis of national and local development documents, press materials and statistical data) we reveal how Hungary’s second largest city, Debrecen, is emerging as a new location of the automotive industry in the intersection of the European and the Asian value chains. By analysing the processes of strategic coupling, we grasp how firm (productive capital), national and local state agency are related in developing a new imaginary and how it is made hegemonic for local and national economic development. The paper unpacks how emergence of the new automotive location can be explained by the long-term location advantages of Eastern Europe and the electromobility-based industrial policy of the Hungarian government on the one hand, and the exhaustion of (human) resources in the traditional locations combined with a state policy highly prioritizing the case study city on the other. We also discuss how reindustrialisation emerged as a source of subjectivity by developing counter-narratives of this imaginary, and why unfolding social movements failed to articulate an alternative hegemonic vision.