Neoliberal European Governance and the Politics of Welfare State Retrenchment: A Critique of the New Malthusians

Abstract

The history of European integration contains its share of social scientific theories, which although they have proven to be spurious have enjoyed significant prominence because of the politico-ideological functions that they have served. Although already the Empty Chair Crisis of 1965 put into severe doubt the postulated mechanisms of neo-functionalism, this evolutionary theory has remained a compulsory reference point for students of European integration. Undoubtedly this has something to do with the raison d’être it gives the EU’s supranational institutions and the positive spin it gave to the corporate-liberal Atlanticist Grand Design that united the US State Department, intellectuals like Jean Monnet and attendant social forces in the 1950s (Milward and Sørensen, 1994; Van der Pijl, 1996). A more recent example is the neo-classical liberal economics of the Cecchini Report (European Commission, 1988), with its euphoric predictions about the cumulative static and dynamic effects of the completion of ‘Europe 1992’. Despite these predictions being far off the mark, neoliberal economics has provided the rationale not only for the Single Market, but also for its disciplinary structuring in financial and monetary arrangements through the European Monetary System (EMS), the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and the reform of European financial services (Gill, 1998; Bieling, 2003a).