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The European Union’s institutional development is highly imbalanced. It has established robust legal authority and institutions, but it remains weak or impotent in terms of its centralization of fiscal, administrative, and coercive capacity. We argue that situating the EU in terms of the history of state-building allows us to better understand the outcomes of EU governance. Historically, political projects centralizing power have been most complete when both market and security pressures are present to generate state formation. With the EU, market forces have had a far greater influence than immediate military threats. We offer a preliminary demonstration of the promise of this approach by applying it to two empirical examples, the euro and the Schengen area. Our analysis suggests that the EU does not need to be a Weberian state, nor be destined to become one, for the state-building perspective to shed new light on its processes of political development.

Core state powers continue moving to the centre of the European polity, yet a sense of collective identity among EU citizens remains fragile. We argue that participatory democracy at the European level is a missing element that might create a more robust collective identity in Europe. We examine the history of polity formation in the early American case to probe the link between collective identity and practices of democratic participation, focusing on contestation about the 1789 US Constitution and the creation of pan‐US political parties in the early 19th century. Everyday democratic practices helped both to represent and to constitute the nationalization of politics in the early USA, as it moved from being a de facto international organization to a unified polity. This suggests that practices of democracy may likewise help to generate a more robust collective political identity in the EU. The historical record makes clear, however, that these processes are often exclusionary, uncertain, and far from unidirectional.

The European Union is facing a new era of politicization. Populist parties across Europe have challenged its legitimacy and ever-expanding authority. While the European Union was designed to govern...

Moravcsik's liberal intergovernmentalism irrevocably upgraded the rigour of European Union scholarship by categorizing the EU as an international organization, and analyzing it in terms of general theories of international relations. The deepening of European governance has meant, however, that the EU today is better understood as a polity in formation, generalizable through the lens of comparative politics instead of international relations. Alongside the burgeoning literature on the EU's politicization, I advocate for comparisons to historical episodes of state‐building and nationalism, with particular attention to the role of culture and identity in shoring up, or contesting, political authority. Doing so allows us to better delineate the challenges presented by European citizens’ lack of impassioned attachment to the EU, while also informing a broader understanding of the populist backlashes occurring in the context of more global trends of transnational authority construction.

Of the multiple narratives EU policymakers could have chosen at the onset of the euro crisis, why did austerity and structural reform win out over other plausible cures for member states’ problems? Arguably, sovereign debt pooling or more federalized economic governance would have been a solution to member states’ national deficits and competitiveness woes. To understand this puzzle, we draw on the sociology of knowledge literature. We argue that the response to the euro crisis was heavily informed by broader social logics that constructed the problem and the solution heavily toward ordoliberal and neoliberal ideas. Mapping the fate of the Eurobond proposals allows us to trace the complex entanglement of economic policy-making and parse out the ways in which social realities are shaped to make particular policy choices seem inevitable, even as they are themselves the product of social processes.

The liberal international order seems to be resting on very shaky ground. While the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote were startling shocks, these developments represented only the most extreme outcomes of anti-globalization and anti-establishment politics that had been growing for some time. As analysts today struggle to understand these complex phenomena, they most often divide their explanations into two opposing camps: identity politics versus economic anxiety. I argue that we need instead to understand the new political cleavages in terms of the interactions between economic circumstances and culture, rather than thinking of them as competing explanations. I offer a new way of theorizing about where interests come from, one that focuses on the stark geographic cleavages of the new post-industrial economy and how these material circumstances have created polarized everyday lived experiences. Although I focus on the US case in this short memo, this emphasis on the cultural class cleavages created by the twenty-first century economy should also illuminate some of the drivers for Brexit and the rise of populist politics more generally.

The election of Donald Trump has been a jarring shock to the American political system. In this paper, I argue that to fully explain the political cleavages driving his victory, and populist trends more broadly, political scientists need to better understand the interaction between material circumstances and cultural identity, rather than seeing them as separate. I begin with the observation that post-industrial transformations have produced a starkly divided economic geography in the US, with cities growing ever more vibrant and rural areas dramatically declining across a variety of important indicators. Although this transformation is widely acknowledged, left unexplored is the impact that this spatial differentiation between regions has on the cultural construction of political cleavages. I propose that the material reality of this pattern of economic activity has generated cultural class bubbles that underlie today’s political polarization. Drawing on the practice turn in political science, I offer an argument about culture as everyday lived experience. This argument helps better account for how economic change translates through culture and identity to become manifest in new political cleavages.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the most severe global economic downturn since the Great Depression. The crisis has provoked soul-searching among economists, yet international political economy (IPE) scholars have been relatively sanguine. We argue that IPE has strayed too far away from studying the geopolitical and systemic causes and consequences of the global economy. IPE must explain the generation and transformation ofglobal financial orders.Both the distribution of political power and the content of economic ideas will shape any emergent global financial order. A Kuhnianlife-cycle frameworkof global financial orders permits a systemic approach to global finance that integrates the study of power and social logics into our understanding of markets.

This article argues that one of the benefits of mainstreaming sociology in EU studies is the potential to better understand the underpinnings of the EU's political authority. In particular, the use of macrohistorical approaches and insights from the sociology of culture literature can help us see what is innovative about the EU as an emergent political form while highlighting the tensions in its claims on European citizens’ loyalty.

The intellectual monoculture that we currently observe in American IPE, based upon an allegiance to liberalism, rationalism and quantitative methodology, is a misguided departure from the pluralism that once defined the discipline. This monoculture is evident in the way we currently train graduate students in IPE and in the gatekeeping practices of the leading international relations journals. Fortunately, there is a continued diversity of work appearing in other fora from that surveyed by Maliniak and Tierney, primarily in book form and in alternative journals. The absence of cross-fertilization from these alternative outlets to the high status journals and graduate syllabi portends poorly for the future of the field. Like agricultural crops susceptible to devastating collapse for lack of diversification, an intellectual monoculture in IPE may be unable to effectively respond to the dramatic changes and critical emerging issues in the world economy today.

Over the past few years, the dollar has been trading at historically low values against the Euro. Does the current trend indicate that the Euro is poised to challenge the long global supremacy of the American greenback? And how might currency rivalry reflect and shape the broader balance of power between the United States and the EU? The approach to the general relationship between power and currency is discussed, the determinants and characteristics of a key currency assessed, and the advantages and disadvantages that accrue to a key currency nation briefly reviewed. The current, and likely future, state of play in the global usage of the dollar, the Euro, and other major currencies are sketched out, stressing the interaction of material factors and the role of ideas and social processes in determining key currency status. On balance, the essay concludes that the Euro has many of the underlying economic factors that would make it a peer competitor to the dollar, but that the necessary political ...

The European Union (EU) represents an historic and monumental scaling up of political authority beyond the nation-state. But its uniqueness should not blind us to the fact that the processes producing the EU reappear throughout history, be it in the rise of the mediaeval Italian city-states, the consolidation of the modern nation-state in the nineteenth century or in the contemporary construction of international governance institutions like the World Trade Organization. By exploring similarities and differences with these cases of political development, the comparative historical approach taken in this volume allows for deeper understanding of processes of change transforming the landscape of governance in Europe (McNamara 2010a). In this chapter, I focus on some of the social logics at work legitimating the transfer of power upwards across a geographic area, namely how space and place generate a particular cultural foundation for authority construction in the EU. Most casual observers of the EU’s use of space and place see only boring official buildings, an inefficient and scandalously expensive vagabond European Parliament that moves from Brussels to Strasbourg, and a bizarrely scattered set of administrative functions located from Thessaloniki, Greece to Helsinki, Finland to Bilbao, Spain. Yet the architecture and geography of the EU’s governing institutions makes sense if we see them as a mechanism for naturalising and culturally legitimating the EU’s peculiarly fraught exercise of power.

The creation of EMU has been one of the most striking examples of economic integration in history. Such deep economic co-operation between states has often proved elusive. This article revisits The Currency of Ideas and assesses what role ideational consensus may play now that the euro is a reality.

Does the creation of the euro imply that the European Union is now speaking with one voice in international monetary matters? Is the EU therefore likely to challenge the hegemony of the United States on the world stage, at least in the realm of international financial diplomacy? This article analyses the current state of external representation of the common currency and asks why the issue of the euro’s single voice has not yet been resolved. Comparing other areas of common policy–making that have an external dimension, such as trade, the authors explore the specificities of monetary and financial affairs that make the conflict between national sovereignty and international efficiency so difficult to settle. In particular, the authors focus on a set of international institutional arrangements regarding economic policy–making within the EU, and external arrangements within international fora (the IMF and the G7), which have so far impeded the ability of the EU to play a coherent role on the international monetary stage. The authors argue that the fact of the euro means there needs to exist a clear system of political representation in the area of monetary and financial governance in the EU, and they explore various options for who the external voice of the euro could be. Finally, the implications of creating the euro’s external voice for transatlantic relations, for EU enlargements, and for the debate about the ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe are analysed.

The conventional wisdom in support of central bank independence rests on a series of contestable arguments about the relationship between democracy, policy making, and economic outcomes. Empirical work casts doubt on the severity of the inflationary problems purportedly solved by delegation to independent central banks, as well as raising questions about the linkages between delegation and superior economic outcomes. So why delegate? Theories of institutional isomorphism, or the copying of organisational models, provide an alternative sociological explanation of the diffusion of central bank independence. Drawing on this approach, it is argued that governments choose central bank independence because delegation has important legitimising and symbolic properties that are attractive to political leaders in times of economic uncertainty. Delegation to independent central banks is rational, efficient, and acceptable in a democratic society because of the cultural processes which define it as such, not because...

The critical foundation for European monetary integration is the neoliberal economic policy convergence that occurred across the majority of the European governments beginning in the mid-1970s and solidifying in the 1980s. While capital mobility determines the conditions under which international monetary agreements can be sustained, political leaders’ policy ideas or shared normative and causal beliefs about monetary policy are necessary to explain whether states choose to meet those conditions. These ideational factors are critical in part because of the high degree of uncertainty over the distributional effects of exchange rate and monetary co-operation, ambiguity which mutes both mass political debate and sectoral interest-group activity. A template of ideational change is thus proposed to explain the path of European monetary integration.

Where do governors come from, what makes them authoritative, and how do they accomplish their goals? This question is perhaps nowhere more intriguing than in the case of the European Union (EU). Despite its dramas of constitutional disarray and financial discord, the EU stands as possibly the most successful innovation in political authority of the past century. The EU is a powerful governor: its rules and decisions are highly consequential for its twenty-seven member states, and it has an international presence across a variety of policy spheres and in ongoing formal international forums such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the G-8. At the same time, the EU's legitimacy continues to be contested by academics, politicians, and citizens alike, in no small part because of its unique nature – not a nation-state, but not an international organization as generally understood. What are the sources of the EU's authority, and how has it managed to be legitimate despite its novelty and in the face of severe constraints and competition from other political actors? How robust is this authority and its legitimating foundations? To answer these questions, I focus on the social processes involved in constructing a political entity as legitimate. Legitimate authority, for my purposes, is a descriptive term, not normative. Authority is “the ability to induce deference in others,” as the editors of this volume state, and an actor can be viewed as legitimate if it achieves a significant level of acceptance without coercion.

The Limits of Transparency: Ambiguity and the History of International Finance. By Jacqueline Best. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 240p. $37.50. While social constructivism has moved into the mainstream of international relations theory, informing scholarship in the subfields of security studies and international organization, its application and status in international political economy (IPE) has lagged behind. From the articles in the highest-status political science journals to the works on graduate syllabi across the major research universities, the study of IPE has been dominated by a single view of markets, drawn from neoclassical economics, premised on a narrow view of rationality, and rooted in materialist foundations.

An analysis is presented of the creation and development of rules governing the organizational form and the policy content of the European Central Bank (ECB). The establishment of the ECB and the launching of the Euro constitute an extraordinary innovation, one that opens and organizes a new institutional space in Europe. The ECB system is assessed in the light of three broad theoretical approaches emphasizing, respectively, power politics, institutions as rational solutions to collective problems, and pre-existing normative (social) structures. Power politics and functional rationality approaches are found to fail to account for important aspects of the ECB’s rules and policy mandates, while, in contrast, a sociological emphasis on institutional context is useful in explaining the continuities linking the ECB to the normative structure that had previously developed – largely within the network of central-bank governors – and diffused throughout the organizational field in which monetary policy-making was embedded. It was the need to legitimize the new ECB in terms of these broader norms that shaped the ECB’s organizational structure and governing rules: in particular, pre-existing norms influenced three key aspects of the ECB – its political independence, its criteria for membership, and its rules for price stability.

One of the sharpest and most consequential divisions in international relations lies between those who believe that international politics is a realm unto its own and those who see the lines between domestic and international politics as both permeable and pertinent. For the former group, the consequences of anarchy swamp any potential for politics to be ordered at the international level as it is within states. In this view, the dynamics of domestic political life, such as the rule of law, norms of trust, or the independent effects of institutions, are foreign to the international system.