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Orthodox integration scholarship failed to identify the factors leading to the euro area (EA) economic and financial crisis because of weaknesses that Horkheimer identified in ‘traditional’ theory: disciplinary splits and a tendency to idealize from particular instrumental perspectives. By contrast, critical political economy offered a plausible and coherent elucidation of the emergent properties and limits of finance-led capitalism and their concrete manifestation in the EA. This contribution both reviews state-of-the-art critical political economy research on the EA crisis and makes a distinct contribution to it. In addressing the puzzle of why not only the Economic and Monetary Union persists despite morbid symptoms but why crisis management is extending and deepening a discredited finance-led capitalism, the contribution synthesizes theories of transnational class formation and inter-state relations, and proposes that Europe is caught in an ordoliberal iron cage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is the introduction to a special collection of contributions that analyse the financial and economic crisis through various theoretical lenses. Accordingly, it does four things. First, it describes the EU's institutional response to the crisis in order to provide a reference point for the contributions. Second, it summarizes the contributions. Third, it compares them in order to develop a theoretical dialogue. Finally, it answers the fundamental question at the heart of the crisis and this special collection: why did Economic and Monetary Union become deeper and more integrated when many feared for its survival? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberal intergovernmentalism explains the politics to cope with the euro area crisis by the constellation of national preferences and bargaining power and by institutional choices designed to commit euro area countries credibly to the currency union. National preferences resulted from high negative interdependence in the euro area and the fiscal position of its member states: a common preference for the preservation of the euro was accompanied by divergent preferences regarding the distribution of adjustment costs. These mixed motives constituted a ‘chicken game’ situation characterized by hard intergovernmental bargaining and brinkmanship. Whereas negotiations produced a co-operative solution averting the breakdown of the euro area and strengthening the credibility of member state commitments, asymmetrical interdependence resulted in a burden-sharing and institutional design that reflected German preferences predominantly. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article analyzes European Commission Directorates-General (DG) online consultations in relation to upper-class influence and business interests in European Union (EU) policy making. Topics include bias in political participation, the Your Voice in Europe online portal, and the influence of business interests on EU political representation.

This paper aims to convince the reader of the potential of a critical version of historical institutionalism (HI) as a theoretical perspective for EU trade policy analysis. It argues that critical HI sensitises the analyst to important but hitherto often neglected factors including: the influence of the past on EU trade policy; the complex, multiarena and multilevel nature of contemporary trade policy; and issues of distributional conflict. The core concept in critical HI is 'reactive sequencing', conceiving of policy evolution as a chain of events produced by reactions and counter-reactions. This paper demonstrates that this is invaluable to understand contemporary EU trade politics. Some examples of EU trade policy decisions and its general strategic evolution since the conclusion of the Uruguay Round are given to show the value of critical HI. Finally, the external dimension of "Europe 2020" as the latest trade policy strategy is analysed from a critical historical institutionalist angle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's (EU's) 2006 Global Europe communication established an offensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA) agenda premised on serving the interests of the EU's upmarket exporters at the expense of the EU's remaining 'pockets of protection'. This has remained in place with the advent of the 2010 Trade, Growth and World Affairs strategy. Such a development defies both rationalist International Political Economy (IPE) explanations - which emphasise the protectionist bias of societal mobilisation - and accounts stressing the institutional insulation of policy-makers from societal pressures because the recent economic crisis and the increased politicisation of EU trade policy by the European Parliament have coexisted without leading to greater protectionism. Adopting a constructivist approach, we show that this turn of events can be explained by the neoliberal ideas internalised by policy-makers in the European Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Trade. We then deploy a novel heuristic to illustrate how DG Trade acted upon these ideas to strategically construct a powerful discursive imperative for liberalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]