The ‘austerity settlement’ has come to define the post-crisis European political economy. Since 2010, parties from across Europe’s political mainstream have implemented austerity and despite the apparent conflict with the interests of their traditional constituents, even social democratic parties have acquiesced to this settlement. However, within the existing literature ‘social democratic austerity’ is currently under-theorized as it is assumed to involve a rather straightforward adaptation of social democrats to neo- and/or ordoliberal ideas. Utilizing rich and original evidence from over 60 elite interviews with key social democratic stakeholders in France, Germany and the UK, this article contests this view. It demonstrates instead that a distinct set of ideas based on New Keynesianism, supply-side economics, and the social investment paradigm provide the ideational foundations for social democratic austerity post-crisis. Understanding this, it is argued, is critical in order to fully appreciate how and why austerity has become dominant in post-crisis Europe.
Brexit creates an opportunity for alternative European financial centres. However, no comprehensive empirical analysis of the strategic positioning of actors within these financial centres has been conducted. In this article we outline findings from an extensive research project which we conducted in Frankfurt and Paris, two of the main ÔrivalsÕ to the City of London, in the aftermath of Brexit. We outline the core findings from this project and argue that the emerging competition between Frankfurt and Paris is shaped through four related axes: diversity, path dependency, territory and regulatory stability. Our analysis has implications for two bodies of literature within EU studies. First, inter-governmentalist and supra-nationalist approaches would benefit from interrogating more closely the contested sub-national politics of financial centres. Second, our analysis adds to a growing body of literature on European disintegration by interrogating the interaction of fragmentary and integrative dynamics in the sphere of European finance.
opportunities for alternative financial centres located inside the remaining EU member states. In this article, we assess the strategic positioning of private and public actors within two European IFCs-Frankfurt and Paris-in the period following the Brexit vote. Agents within these centres are seeking to differentially benefit from Brexit in two vulnerable financial subsectors away from the City and by domestic and European regulatory reforms. In light of these findings we argue that existing approaches to financial centre relations-in particular-should engage with the ways in which political actors shape European financial relations and regulatory convergence after Brexit, new competitive orientations are also in evidence as political actors seek to privilege their territories relative to rival spaces. *Manuscript without author identifiers (ensure filename does not include author name) Click here to download Manuscript without author identifiers (ensure filename does not include author name): Manuscript.docx Click here to view linked References Highlights
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