Description
In A Place for All to Prosper, Malgorzata Mazurek tells the story of two economists who imagined a radically new path for ethnically mixed, developing countries: one that turned them from places to leave into sites of prosperity. At the height of the Great Depression, many Eastern Europeans saw economic development and living among ethnic Others as mutually exclusive. While most European states treated ethnic minorities as demographic burdens, some advanced the opposite view: that a nation's greatest resource was its working population, minorities included. Behind this vision stood Michal Kalecki and Ludwik Landau, two Warsaw economists who developed what Mazurek calls "full employment developmentalism"—a framework arguing that poor countries could achieve prosperity not through emigration and ethnic purification, but by securing decent livelihoods for the people already living within their borders. Mazurek shows how Kalecki and Landau's ideas emerged as a response to the toxic convergence of capitalist austerity and ethnonationalism that was remaking interwar Europe. She traces how their central conviction helped shape postwar development thinking across the decolonizing world. In doing so, she recovers a forgotten history, revealing that many principles now associated with modern development economics originated not in the traditional centers of Western thought but in the turbulent landscape of interwar Eastern Europe. In an era marked by resurgent nationalism and deepening inequality, A Place for All to Prosper revives a powerful and timely argument: that economic justice and ethnic inclusion are not competing aims but mutually reinforcing foundations of a thriving nation-state.