Monetary Union in Crisis

This volume presents a radical reinterpretation of the European Community or Union as a neo-liberal construction. It was neo-liberal rather than classically liberal because it was designed and used as an external instrument to weaken the interventionist welfare state that protected working people and strengthened the hand of labor. It was founded on the vision of a free market untrammelled by public intervention and worked to ensure competition, sound money and profitability against the inflationary force of workers and unions and the welfare state. Monetary union in particular restored profitability but produced slow growth, mass unemployment, and insecurity and came under challenge, most dramatically in France, by working people from below. This view is substantiated by an economically based study of member-state performance and complemented by a series of national studies on the monetarist turn by leading scholars.

This volume presents a radical reinterpretation of the European Community or Union as a neo-liberal construction. It was neo-liberal rather than classically liberal because it was designed and used as an external instrument to weaken the interventionist welfare state that protected working people and strengthened the hand of labor. It was founded on the vision of a free market untrammelled by public intervention and worked to ensure competition, sound money and profitability against the inflationary force of workers and unions and the welfare state. Monetary union in particular restored profitability but produced slow growth, mass unemployment, and insecurity and came under challenge, most dramatically in France, by working people from below. This view is substantiated by an economically based study of member-state performance and complemented by a series of national studies on the monetarist turn by leading scholars.

The European Union as Neo-Liberal Construction; B.H.Moss PART I: HISTORY OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY The Neo-Liberal Constitution: EC Law and History; B.H.Moss Raisons d'être: The Failure of Constructive Integration; B.H.Moss The Theories of Integration: American Political Paradigms; B.H.Moss National Labor Regimes: The European Community in Class Context; B.H.Moss Socialist Challenge: Class Politics in France; B.H.Moss From ERM to EMU: Monetary Union and its Discontents; B.H.Moss PART II: MONETARIST FETTERS: THE QUANTIFIABLE FAILURE OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY The Economic Failure of European Integration; G.Friedman PART III: THE MONETARIST TURN IN MEMBER STATES: NEO-LIBERAL, SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC, COMMUNIST 'Ordo-Liberalism' Trumps Keynesianism in German Political Economy; C.Allen The Political Economy of the UK, 1979-2002; J.Michie The 'Monetarist' Turn in Belgium and the Netherlands; E.Jones Italian Communism and the Long Road to Austerity; T.Abse Transnational Neo-Liberalism and the Demise of the Swedish Model; A.Bieler