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In early 2019, the German Ministry of Economic Affairs revealed its National Industrial Strategy 2030. Even though attenuated due to fierce domestic opposition, it marks a shift towards a more selective, interventionist industrial policy. In particular, this shift has instigated far-reaching upheavals in EU competition policy under Franco-German pressure. This article probes into the determinants of this shift in Germany, a country (in-)famous for its allegedly ordoliberal stance, especially with regard to competition policy and EU economic integration. Drawing on regulation and critical state theory, neo-Gramscian IPE as well as historical materialist policy analysis, and based on trade and investment data, document analysis and expert interviews, it reconstructs the crisis tendencies and the constellation of interests and actors which have underpinned this shift in Germany. The article argues that – in face of growing geopolitical rivalries and technological decoupling – the NIS 2030 indicates a strategic re-orientation in relevant parts of the German power bloc towards actively promoting 'technological sovereignty' and 'European champions', thereby also calling into question an important facet of the EU's neoliberal new-constitutionalist architecture. However, this re-orientation is deeply contested, revealing growing divisions within German capital along diverging competitive positions and patterns of internationalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical-materialist policy analysis (HMPA) aims at analyzing how specific policies are formulated against the background of essentially competing and contradictory interests of different social forces. It examines how, if at all, these policies contribute to societal reproduction and the regulation of social contradictions and crisis tendencies. This article provides a concise introduction to HMPA as well as to the key theoretical concepts and perspectives underpinning its policy concept. Against this background, it further elaborates on how to operationalize HMPA for empirical research, drawing on but also going beyond the three-step process of context-, actors- and process-analysis suggested by the Research Group 'State Project Europe'. In this way, we seek to enhance the analytical and methodological repertoire of historical materialist political science, and at the same time open up new analytical perspectives within the comprehensive field of critical policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The negotiations over the Eurozone crisis have increasingly come to reflect Poulantzas' idea of 'authoritarian statism', i.e., a decline in the relevance of democratic institutions and a shift in political power towards technical state apparatuses. Yet, scholarly approaches to transnational integration have provided little guidance as to why monetary relations have become such a pronounced point of condensation for the contradictions inherent in European integration. While mainstream theories of monetary unions such as optimal currency area theory neglect the impact of state power and class interests on monetary politics, more critical perspectives on transnational integration have paid insufficient attention to monetary governance and its role in the mediation of international relations. The present paper brings heterodox theories of international relations and monetary integration to bear on the increasingly authoritarian dynamics of Eurozone governance. Reflecting on Bruff's discussion of authoritarian neoliberalism, we proceed to examine how the circumvention of democratic institutions via Eurozone monetary governance is more precisely captured through the notion of transnational authoritarian statism. We develop this concept in relation to two historical periods of European integration: the formation of the Economic and Monetary Union and the recent extension of the European Central Bank's scope of monetary governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten years of crisis. Regulation of wage relations and unequal development in the European Union. Ten years after the outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis, this article explores key results of austerity based crisis management in the EU. Focusing on the decisive shifts in European economic governance, it argues that the dominant crisis management strategies have increasingly transposed the regulation of the wage relations, i.e. labour market and wage policies, to the European level. This made it possible to contain and even overcome the crisis on a short-term basis, mostly at the expense of wage-dependent parts of the population in Southern Europe. However, as the analysis of key macroeconomic indicators suggests, these crisis management strategies have failed to resolve the fundamental imbalances and contradictions of uneven development in Europe. Currently, Italy in particular has become the point of condensation of these imbalances and contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent sovereign debt crisis in Europe appears to have consolidated the ideological and the historical actuality of the European state project, but not in the manner that many of its advocates would have hoped. Far from deepening democratisation, what has emerged instead is a political terrain increasingly reminiscent of what Nicos Poulantzas termed ‘authoritarian statism'. The present article aims to illuminate this phenomenon in relation to the institutional shifts within the EU that both preceded and followed the debt crisis, as well as in relation to the historical processes of uneven and combined development that form the ground upon which the European state project has been erected. Our overarching goal is to theorise the EU as a manifestation of contradictory tendencies towards transnationalisation within which elements of nation-states play a constitutive role, but one that simultaneously exacerbates Europe's crisis tendencies. It is this intractable tension within the internal structure of the EU that has given rise to a transnational authoritarian statism across Europe expressed in a ‘strengthening–weakening’ of state power, i.e. a reinforcement of state authority that simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the political crisis to which it seeks to respond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]