Table Of ContentContradictions and Limits of Neoliberal
European Governance
Contradictions and Limits
of Neoliberal European
Governance
From Lisbon to Lisbon
Edited by
Bastiaan van Apeldoorn
Reader in International Relations
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Jan Drahokoupil
Senior Research Fellow
Universitiit Mannheim, Germany
and
Laura Horn
Lecturer in International Relations
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
palgrave
macmillan
* Selection and editorial content © Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Jan Drahokoupil and
Laura Horn 2009 Individual chapters © contributors Foreword © Bob Jessop 2009
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contradictions and limits of neoliberal European governance: from
Lisbon to Lisbon / edited by Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Jan
Drahokoupil, Laura Horn.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-349-35886-1
1. Neoliberalism-Europe. 2. Europe-Politics and government.
3. Europe-Economic integration. I. Apeldoorn, Bastiaan van.
II. Drahokoupil, Jan, 1980- III. Horn, Laura.
JC574.C656 2009
320.51--dc22 2008030652
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Transferred to Digital Printing 2011
Contents
List of Tables vii
Foreword viii
Notes on Contributors xii
Acknowledgements xv
List of Abbreviations xvi
Introduction: Towards a Critical Political Economy of European
Governance 1
Jan Drahokoupi/, Bastiaan van Apeldoom and Laura Hom
Part I The Nature and Limits of the European Neoliberal
Project
1 The Contradictions of 'Embedded Neoliberalism' and Europe's
Multi-level Legitimacy Crisis: The European Project and its Limits 21
Bastiaan van Apeldoom
2 Neoliberal European Governance and the Politics of Welfare
State Retrenchment: A Critique of the New Malthusians 44
Magnus Ryner
3 Geopolitics and Neoliberalism: US Power and the Limits of
European Autonomy 64
Alan W. Cafruny
Part II Case Studies of European Socio-Economic Regulation
4 Global Finance and the European Economy: The Struggle over
Banking Regulation 87
Hans-Jiirgen Bieling and Johannes Jiiger
5 'New Europeans' for the 'New European Economy': Citizenship
and the Lisbon Agenda 106
Sandy Brian Hager
6 Organic Intellectuals at Work? The High Level Group of
Company Law Experts in European Corporate Governance
Regulation 125
Laura Hom
v
vi Contents
Part III The Widening of Neoliberal Governance:
Transnational Capitalism in Central
and Eastern Europe
7 Corporate Tax Reform in Neoliberal Europe: Central and
Eastern Europe as a Template for Deepening the Neoliberal
European Integration Project? 143
Arjan Vliegenthart and Henk Overbeek
8 Race to the Bottom? Transnational Companies and Reinforced
Competition in the Enlarged European Union 163
Dorothee Bohle
9 The Rise of the Competition State in the Visegnid Four:
Internationalization of the State as a Local Project 187
Jan Drahokoupil
Part IV Contesting Neoliberal Governance: Resisting
Restructuring in National and
Transnational Arenas
10 A National Case-Study of Embedded Neoliberalism and its
Limits: The Dutch Political Economy and the 'No' to the
European Constitution 211
Bastiaan van Apeldoom
11 Globalization and Regional Integration: The Possibilities and
Problems for Trade Unions to Resist Neoliberal Restructuring
in Europe 232
Andreas Bieler
References 250
Index 285
Tables
2.1 'Post-industrialism' in different types of welfare state:
Hypothesis versus empirics 57
7.1 Main taxes in the general government revenue structure
(% GDp, 1996) 152
7.2 Tax systems in post-socialist Europe 155
8.1 Extending Hirschman's model: Strategic options of the
countermovement 167
8.2 Socio-economic indicators of the East European capitalisms 175
8.3 Indicators of Eastern Europe's competitiveness 177
8.4 Employment protection legislation in the Visegrad countries 183
vii
Foreword
I congratulate the editors and authors of this important collection of essays
on the European political project for producing an innovative and coherent
contribution to the renewal of critical political economy. The resulting vol
ume is especially timely. It appears in a critical conjuncture when the limita
tions of unregulated finance-led accumulation have become evident to
everyone from the problems originating in the Anglosphere and their global
repercussions. Thus the contributors address the emergence of European
integration, the Lisbon Agenda, neoliberal governance projects on the
national, EU and supranational scales, and related strategies from the view
point of a neo-Gramscian concern with accumulation strategies, state proj
ects, and hegemonic visions and their social bases. Equally importantly, they
explore the basic contradictions at the heart of the capital relation, their par
ticular forms of appearance in contemporary Europe in the wider context of
a variegated global capitalism and its associated geo-politics, and the emerg
ing economic, legitimacy and social crises of finance-led neoliberal mode
of growth. Indeed, a concern with basic contradictions, class conflicts and
resistance is one of the defining features of this volume. Nonetheless we
should note that most of the contributions are mainly concerned, as the title
indicates, with the limits of the European Union political project - whether
these are reflected in the Growth and Stability Pact, the Lisbon Agenda, the
rejected constitutional settlement, or other forms and sites of governance.
This focus is reflected in a recurrent concern with the crisis of mass political
legitimacy of the European project and its associated forms of social partner
ship and (multi-level) governance rather than with the fundamental eco
nomic limits of the neoliberal project, whether in its more disembedded
Anglo-Saxon form or its more embedded Continental European variants.
This focus follows from many contributors' interest in what van Apeldoorn
(2002) describes as the socio-economic content or underlying social purpose
of the European integration process as well as with its institutional form.
This remark is not intended to counterpose a claim about economic deter
mination in the last instance to an alleged one-sided concern with the state,
governance and politics. On the contrary, one of the most interesting fea
tures of the essays below is their recognition of (a) the importance of capi
talist contradictions, conflicts rooted in different roles within the circuit of
capital and/or global division of labour and class conflicts, and (b) the
dependence of capitalist reproduction on extra-economic structural and
institutional supports and specific forms of institutionalized compromise
within the power bloc and between it and popular social forces.
Nonetheless I do want to emphasize even more strongly than do these
viii
Foreword ix
essays that the political crises, including the crisis of mass legitimacy, are
related to emerging economic problems. These concern not only growing
economic inequalities and social exclusion but also the emerging structural
crisis at the heart of a variegated world market organized under the domi
nance of a neoliberal, finance-led accumulation strategy. It is this structural
crisis that has become self-evident as the repercussions of the 'sub-prime'
crisis (a symptom of more deep-seated problems) have spread in unexpected
ways around the world. What is particularly striking about this crisis is that,
in contrast to the so-called East Asian crisis in the late 1990s, it emerged in
the heartlands of neoliberalism. Whereas the misleading naming of the
East Asian crisis disguises the first symptoms of a general crisis in the world
market by focusing on where they first appeared, the origins of the current
crisis provide a much more telling index of the crucial flaws in disembed
ded or 'pure' capitalism (Husson 2008). Whether or not this leads to a gen
eral crisis of capitalism does not depend on the economic (il)logic of
capitalism alone, however, but on the political, intellectual and moral strug
gles of the kind that the neo-Gramscian approach favoured by many con
tributors highlights.
In addition to this widely shared neo-Gramscian approach to critical polit
ical economy, several other themes tend to unify the contributions. First,
while often pre-disciplinary in inspiration (witness the references to Marxist
political economy, Polanyian analyses of the embedding of the market econ
omy in a market society, and neo-Gramscian concern with class fractions,
subaltern groups and political, intellectual and moral hegemony), most
essays also display a distinctive flare for novel and effective trans-disciplinary
analysis, critically combining concepts and perspectives from heterodox
work in several disciplines as well as drawing creatively on several emerging
inter-diSciplinary perspectives. Second, many are not only concerned with
the systemic logic (or, indeed, illogic) of neoliberalism - including its more
embedded European variants - but also with the more or less active strategiC
role of specific social forces, whether dominant, sub-dominant or subaltern
in establishing, guiding, mediating or resisting this logic. Thus many con
tributors seek to denaturalize and deconstruct neoliberalism and illustrate
the complicity of key social forces - including in Europe itself - in the spread
of neoliberalism and, especially, of finance-led accumulation strategies.
Third, many essays engage critically with important ontological and episte
mological questions and display remarkable methodological self-awareness
about research problems in political economy. Key issues include identifica
tion of the underlying mechanisms of capital accumulation, its tendencies
and counter-tendencies, and their associated contradictions; the complex
dialectic of structure and agency and the asymmetrical opportunities for
securing material interests that are inscribed in specific economic and polit
ical regimes; and the equally complex interaction of internal and external
structural constraints and internal and external forces in shaping economic
x Foreword
and social policy as well as the success and failure of specific regimes and
strategies.
Substantively, the contributions explore the impact of neoliberalism in
the fields of economic and social policy, the rearticulation of scales of eco
nomic and social policy formulation and implementation (and associated
opportunities for scale jumping), and new forms of governance and meta
governance at various scales. This is reflected in the increased importance
attached to competitiveness, innovation, entrepreneurship, flexibility, active
labour markets, the rescaling and recalibration of governance, the form and
content of the failing Lisbon Agenda and its associated Open Method of
Coordination, and the manner in which emerging European governance
structures are related to more general efforts to establish international regimes
and forms of global governance appropriate to a neoliberal order organized
in the shadow of American hegemony. But most of the contributions in this
volume go beyond mere description of these trends, which are very common
in the literature, to resist a 'premature harmonization of contradictions', a
concern that is far less common in work on the European Union. Thus,
although not always as systematic in their presentation as I would like to see,
the essays often highlight the contradictions and tensions at the heart of the
European project, economically as well as politically, and reveal the surpris
ing ways in which these contradictions and tensions have manifested them
selves. Thus we find references to the uneven development of the European
Union, the impact of new Member States' economic and social policies on
the capacity of founding members to maintain the European social model,
the contradictions built into the Stability and Growth Pact, resistance to the
constitutional settlement, and so on. In their different ways and with their
quite different foci, therefore, the contributions make a powerful cumulative
case for a critical political economy that treats economic and political proj
ects as potentially decisive material as well as discursive forces in social devel
opment, without seeing them as essentially arbitrary and wilful acts of power
on the part of the dominant fractions or classes and/or political elites and
state managers. On the contrary, they demonstrate clearly the economic and
political limits of specific projects as these are rooted in the more basic ten
dencies of capital accumulation in a variegated world market with its com
plex geo-political and geo-economic dynamiCS. This is reflected in turn in the
contributors' interest in the flanking and supporting mechanisms that have
kept the neoliberal project alive in Europe (witness the compromise char
acter of the Lisbon Agenda itself and the recent manoeuvres around the
new, post-referendum constitutional settlement) as well as in the role of sub
altern forces, social movements and resistance in reinforcing the objective
limits to neoliberal globalization and its manifestations and/or repercus
sions in Europe.
For these reasons, among many others, I congratulate the editors and con
tributors on this joint work and commend it, as with all other scientific
