Regulation Theory and the Political Economy of the European Union

Abstract

AbstractEuropean integration theory considers to what extent the EU can realize a telos where American pluralism is the template. Not without merits, but considering the financial and eurozone crises fatally, such perspectives elide power relations and attendant contradictions and irrationalities that are constitutive of transatlantic integration itself. Regulation theory, which synthesizes the reformist ethos of Europe's postwar statist tradition and Marxism, and which has produced a considerable body of analysis of the EU published at the margins of EU scholarship, offers a compelling alternative that potentially overcomes these shortcomings. This article critically assesses how regulation theory has interpreted the single market, financial liberalization and EMU as a suppression of alternatives to neoliberal post‐Fordism, or finance‐led accumulation, in Europe. It argues that understanding the EU's current conjuncture of eurozone crisis management requires a neo‐Gramscian extension of regulation theory, stressing transnational patterns of capitalist accumulation and power relations.