Abstract:
Markets require rules, made and enforced by governments, and modern market-making has therefore unfolded as an intrinsic part of state-building. While the European Union is not a Weberian state, it has not been immune to these processes. Over the last three decades it has constructed a Single European Market and a currency while building political authority and expanding its institutional capacities. The EU has done this through supranational market-making largely centered on neoliberal precepts of competition and openness. Today, however, the EU is breaking with that tradition by pursuing an active, interventionist European industrial and geopolitical market-making strategy, layered above the member-states. Scholars have yet to fully grapple with this new and contentious shift. This paper begins this task by describing and mapping European industrial policy and situating it within the larger global turn to industrial policy, while raising a series of questions about the political sources and consequences of this change for the EU’s political development, and for broader transformations in capitalism in Europe and beyond.
Moderator: Sarah Bauerle Danzman