American Power and the Crisis of Social Democracy in Europe's 2nd Project of Integration.

This paper argues that the concept ‘interiorization’ (Poulantzas, 1974)provides us with a subtler understanding of the interrelated spatial fixesof the contemporary IPE that overcomes the more or less Kautskian/Leninistand Supranational/Intergovernmental dualisms that continue to characterisethe field. With regards to the economic structure, the concept allows usto grasp how it is possible for European capitalism to be subsumeddirectly within the social relations of US capitalism whilst stillmaintaining independent bases of competition. With regards topolitico-ideological structures, the concept allows us to understand why atransnational neo-liberal hegemony at the same time is a distinctly UShegemony, whereby the US state increasingly displaces externalities on therest of the world, including Europe, without this undermining theconsensual aspects of transnational relations. In a concluding section,the paper also demonstrates that the concept of interiorization is centralto the (terminal?) crisis of European social democracy: A Europeanbourgeoisie ‘interiorized’ with American capital is increasingly alienatedfrom European social formations and as a result is not amenable to theclass compromises which social democracy presupposes. This in turnundermines the capacity of social democracy to perform a ‘politics ofmediation’ over a wide range of cleavage structures. This undermining isdangerous as it has been essential to the very essence of European (socialand Christian) democracy in the post World War II period (cf. vanKersbergen, 1995). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]