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The article presents a report on the social construction of the European economy. The report aims to reveal the essential discurvity of the economy to be able to reinvent and politicize political economy away from its mainstream complacency. It discusses how a constructivist approach to the economy can be developed. It concludes that the European economy is soft since claims about its existence do not cause the rational narration of a singular policy pathway or neoliberalism.

An important topic for research in recent decades has been member state compliance with international agreements. Explanations for signatory compliance have included state capacity, ideology of governments, ambiguity of treaties, exogenous social and economic shocks as well as the existence of credible enforcement mechanisms. We look to test existing theories on European member state compliance with the Stability and Growth Pact. Our dataset consists of the original EU-15 countries over a period of nine years. We examine member state compliance in two areas: 1) with regard to avoiding excessive deficits; and 2) compliance with explicit recommendations for action contained within annual EU Commission Assessments of member state stability/convergence programs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite Marx minuting that, ‘the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world,’ there is a heavily Eurocentric perspective in much historical sociology debate on state formation and the rise of the modern capitalist states-system. This impinges on attempts to understand the origins of capitalism in terms of feudal crisis, agrarian class structures, and economic development in Europe resting on changes in social property relations. In contrast, a contribution is made in this paper to the focus on transformations in social property relations by understanding the social origins of the transition to capitalism in Mexico. There are two principal steps to the argument. First, there is a focus on processes of primitive accumulation that created the conditions of development for capitalist production and national consolidation of the internal market in Mexico. This is understood as a ‘passive revolution’ based on state intervention to guide political modernisation. Second, this account of ‘passive revolution’ in Mexico is related to the subsequent unfolding of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) and specifically its so-called ‘institutional phase’ between 1920-1940. Overall, the argument promotes an understanding of state formation and processes of primitive accumulation by tracing the class strategy, or ‘passive revolution’, of the state in Mexico, which gave capitalism there a particular form consistent with authoritarian and hegemonic influence. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]