The economic constitution of the European community: From Rome to Maastricht

Negative and Positive Integration in the Political Economy of European Welfare States

“…In the same way, the increasing transnational integration of capital and product markets, and especially the completion of the European internal market, re duces the freedom of national governments and unions to raise the regulatory and wage costs of national firms above the level prevailing in competing loca tions. Moreover, and if nothing else changes, the "competition of regulatory systems" that is generally welcomed by neoliberal economists (Streit/Mussler 1995) and politicians, may well turn into a downward spiral of competitive deregulation in which all competing countries will find themselves reduced to a level of protection that is in fact lower than preferred by any of them.…”

Introduction: the problem-solving capacity of multi-level governance

“…The background assumption, shared by authors celebrating or lamenting the political consequences of economic integration (Mestmäcker 1987(Mestmäcker , 1994Streit and Mussler 1995;Streeck 1995a;Kapteyn 1996) can be stated in one sentence: the elimination of economic boundaries creates conditions of regulatory competition 1 among nation states that must constrain the capacity of governments and unions to tax and to regulate mobile capital and firms (Sinn 1993;Sinn 1996), whereas political institutions above the national level are not (yet) capable of governing the capitalist economy with the same degree of effectiveness and democratic legitimacy that was achieved nationally during les trentes glorieuses after the Second World War.…”

(Re) Conceptualising a Social Market Economy for the EU Internal Market

“…Most importantly, a division was envisaged between what would later be coined in academic quarters as the Economic Constitution and nationally embedded social law and policies. 16 Not only would the EEC be limited in terms of its competences to create social (redistributive) policy, the national social sphere would also largely be insulated from the Utrecht Law Review | Volume 15 | Issue 2, 2019 | Special Issue: Social Market Economy supranational market order. 17 Thus came into existence the idea of a 'de-coupled' supranational market order that was largely separate from the national democratic social constitutions of the Member States.…”