Financial Crisis, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in the Production of Knowledge about the EU

Abstract

Although the financial/Eurozone crisis has profound effects on the EU, European integration scholarship failed to even recognise that there might be a problem. This article argues that this is due to the highly orthodox nature of European integration scholarship and the blind-spots that inhere in its instrumentalist basic code. It makes the case for a heterodox recasting of the production of knowledge about the EU, and argues that post-Keynesian, post-Marxist and neo-Weberian political economy can make significant contributions in that regard.

A Different Europe is Possible: The Professionalization of EU Studies and the Dilemmas of Integration in the 21st Century

“…But equally, the successful establishment of a scholarly narrative about what the object of study is and what is happening has the potential to privilege some approaches over others. Moreover, the policy and academic domains are not necessarily separated, and there is a growing body of work to suggest that the relationship between the two fields – in the co‐production of knowledge – should be of particular interest to scholars of the EU (Adler‐Nissen and Kropp, ; Mudge and Vauchez, ; Ryner, ; White, ).…”

Macro-lite: Ways to Understand Europe-Making in the Global Era

“…Through the antinomy between intergovernmentalist and integrationist positions, Europe/ EU is ordered politically and affectively through the competing claims of national, European or supranational jurisdictions, competences and identities, and, as Caporaso noted in the mid-1990s, by the 'inarticulate major premises' of territorial rule (1996,31; see also Ryner 2010). In turn, these assumptions have been roundly challenged, with the critique of what, or might, constitute European unity shifting away from degrees of more-or-less integration to subtler accounts of 'Europeanization' (Cowles, Caporaso, and Risse 2001;Schmidt 2002;Wallace and Wallace 2000).…”

Post-crisis social democratic policy capacity in France and the United Kingdom: A lesson from the globalisation and social democracy debate

“…Both of these situations are resultant not from governmental profligacy, but from the failings of regulatory liberalism (Mügge, 2011), both within EU architecture and national growth models, which permitted systemic fragility and volatility. Mainstream liberal economic thinking was not able, therefore, to anticipate the present crisis and even served to induce it (Mügge, 2011;Ryner, 2012;Boyer, 2013;Hay, 2013). The following sections seek to set out how both parties have constructed their fiscal policies within this post-crisis political economic environment.…”