nav-icons nav-icons
Progress in Political Economy (PPE) Progress in Political Economy (PPE)
LOGIN REGISTER
LOGIN
REGISTER
linklink
  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
Social Security Reform: Revisiting Henderson, Poverty and Basic Income
Previous
#7CheapThings: Cheap Lives
Next

The European Union and Global Capitalism reviewed

by Jamie Jordan on December 20, 2017

The European Union and Global Capitalism reviewed

Jamie Jordan | December 20, 2017

Tags: Eurozone
Eurozone
| 0 658

As the authors Magnus Ryner and Alan Cafruny state in The European Union and Global Capitalism, ‘this book offers the first synthetic introduction to perspectives on the EU from a critical political economy [CPE] viewpoint’ (p. 3). It does so brilliantly. It uses the multiple crises facing the EU – the annexation of Crimea in the Ukraine, the euro debt crisis, and the refugee/migrant crisis – to examine the deeper ‘limitations, contradictions, and crisis tendencies’ of EU integration. Ryner and Cafruny have produced a text which should be at the forefront of shaping debates on the future of Europe’s political economy.

The book is essentially constituted by three sections. The first focuses on the key theoretical debates surrounding EU integration. Critiquing the ‘sanitised, idealised, and teleological assumptions’ that shape liberal and realist (and their more contemporary variants) analysis, Ryner and Cafruny shift attention to the possibilities offered by neo-Marxism and neo-Gramscian perspectives. The second section of the book then applies this critique and their alternative. There is a focus on a range of key topics, both important in their own right, but also developed in a complementary manner to create a coherent whole. These include: the origins and development of European Monetary Union (EMU) and how this shaped trajectories towards the euro crisis; the history and role of welfare state capitalism(s) and the future of the ‘social dimension’ of EU policy; and the cohering of an EU ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ as integration has deepened and widened. The third section then shifts attention to a global scale. It analyses how EU integration and European capitalism has been, and continues to be, shaped under the ‘shadow’ of U.S. hegemony, and the EU’s interaction with the global south, both in its near eastern and southern neighbourhood and beyond when focusing on the ‘question of China’.

The text ends on a pessimistic note about the possibility of pursuing more socially equitable and just routes out of the crises identified. Given the analysis which precedes it, this is a legitimate conclusion. However, there is no systematic engagement with debates about the role of various ‘transnational protest groups’. Through a greater engagement with actors and actions that both resist and develop alternatives, the argument that such groups face an almost insurmountable set of ‘structural limitations’ would be more convincing. Without it, we are left with a domination-oriented analysis which has been well critiqued in recent years, but is not recognised, for example see Nikolai Huke, Mònica Clua-Losada and David Bailey on ‘Disrupting the European Crisis: A Critical Political Economy of Contestation, Subversion and Escape’.

This post was previously posted in Political Studies Review

Share this post

  • Tweet
  • Share Post:

Author: Jamie Jordan

Jamie is a Lecturer in International Relations at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Related Posts

 

The euro crisis, the limits of market integration and uneven development

The crisis that hit members of the Eurozone a decade ago has often been attributed to design flaws in Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. Drawing on a new study co-authored...

 

What’s wrong with post-Keynesian accounts of the Eurozone crisis?

There is general agreement that the Eurozone crisis has had a devastating impact on countries in Europe’s periphery, especially in the south. This is expressed in record level...

 

The Making of the Modern “Debt State”

The Making of the Modern “Debt State”: What We Know (and Don’t Know) About Ownership of the Public Debt

In a previous contribution to SPERI Comment, I presente...

 

Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25)

Motto: The EU will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate

Mission: TO DEMOCRATISE EUROPE!

A manifesto f...

Comments

Leave a Response Cancel reply


Join our mailing list

© Progress in Political Economy (PPE)

Privacy | Designed by Nucleo | Terms and Conditions

  • Home
  • About
  • Manchester University Press Book Series
  • Past & Present Reading Group
  • A Political Economy of Australian Capitalism
  • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE)
    • JAPE Issues
    • JAPE Submission Guidelines
    • JAPE Young Scholar Award
  • Australian IPE Network (AIPEN)
  • Forums
    • Forums
    • Debating Anatomies of Revolution
    • Debating Debtfare States
    • Debating Economic Ideas in Political Time
    • Debating Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India
    • Debating Social Movements in Latin America
    • Debating The Making of Modern Finance
    • Debating War and Social Change in Modern Europe
    • Feminist Global “Secureconomy”
    • Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Global Crises
    • Scandalous Economics
    • The Military Roots of Neoliberal Governance
    • Politicising artistic pedagogies
  • Literary Geographies of Political Economy
  • Pedagogy
    • Five Minute Honours Theses
    • Piketty Forum
    • Radical Economics Pedagogy
    • Unconventional Wisdom
    • Journal Club
    • Marxism Reading Group
  • Wheelwright Lecture
  • Events
  • Contributors
  • Links
    • Political Economy At Sydney
    • PHD in Political Economy
    • Master of Political Economy
    • Centre for Future Work
    • Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ)
    • Climate Justice Research Centre (UTS)
 

Loading Comments...