Dead man walking? Current European interest in the ordoliberal tradition

Abstract

During the years of the financial crisis, ordoliberalism became the target of a European‐wide critical campaign. This school of thought is widely perceived as the ideational source of Germany's crisis politics, which has even led to an “ordoliberalisation of Europe”. This essay questions the validity of such assessments. It focuses on two aspects that are widely neglected in current debates. One is the importance of law in the ordoliberal vision of the ordering of economy and society. The second is its cultural and religious background, in particular in German Protestantism. The influence of the ordoliberal school on European law, so the essay argues, is overrated in all stages of the integration project. Anglo‐American neoliberalism rather than German ordoliberalism has been in the ideational driver's seat since the 1980s. In the responses to the financial crisis, the ordoliberal commitment to the rule of law gave way to discretionary emergency measures. While the foundational synthesis of economic and legal concepts became indefensible, the cultural underpinnings of the ordoliberal tradition survived and developed a life of their own, in particular in German political discourses.

Doing Away with the Sovereign: Neoliberalism and the Promotion of Market Discipline in European Economic Governance

“…van Apeldoorn 2009; Schmidt and Thatcher 2014), whereas the notion of ordoliberalism has inspired analyses of EMU's fiscal rules, the model of the ECB and the influence of Germany's economic model and stability culture on euro crisis policies and debates (e.g. Ryner 2015;Bonefeld 2017;Hien and Joerges 2018). In this article I favour the notion of 'disciplinary neoliberalism' coined by Gill (1995;1998) to indicate that European economic governance is not isolated from broader international governing regimes and rationalities.…”

“…Over the past decade the economic crisis has given rise to a wide-ranging and multidisciplinary effort to analyse the EMU and its current predicaments in terms of neoliberalism and ordoliberalism (e.g. Schmidt and Thatcher 2014;Streeck 2015;Ryner 2015;Bonefeld 2017;Cardwell and Snaith 2018;Hien and Joerges 2018). 1 The present article subscribes to the underlying argument in this literature that to understand Eurozone's current predicament, it is useful to appreciate how EMU's institutions and policies have been influenced by neoliberalism and to explore its contradictory nature as an intellectual and political project.…”

Ordoliberal articulation of law-economy complex

“…29 Furthermore, Schmitt shares something else with ordoliberals. 30 Namely, both he and ordoliberals promote a certain kind of "comprehensive decision" (Gesamtentscheidung). 31 Eucken interprets the term (which was already used with references to Schmitt by Böhm in the aforementioned part) as a sort of general "decision" 32 in relation to "economic life", in other words, "economic constitution" is nothing more than an expression of the said form of constitutive decision of those who decided to live a common life in a certain way.…”

Ordoliberalism and Neoliberalization: Governing through Order or Disorder

“…Here I approach it as a mode of social organization (or, befitting the German origins of ordoliberalism, as a Vergesellschaftungsmodus, i.e. mode of societalization) that is based on a specific legal order rather than generalized market exchange, and involves specific ethicopolitical commitments to underpin and legitimate that legal order (see Hien and Joerges, 2018; on societalization, see Jessop, 2002;Stichweh, 2019).…”