Popis: |
This chapter examines European integration from the perspective of critical political economy. It first situates the belated arrival of political economy in integration studies within the context of the division of the social sciences in the late nineteenth century. It then considers the crisis of the Bretton Woods system and how it served to revive the study of political economy through the establishment of a subdiscipline of international political economy. It also explores the key strands of political economic analysis as they were imported into the study of the European Union, focusing on the ‘varieties of capitalism’ perspective, neo-Marxism, and regulation theory. Finally, it discusses from the perspective of critical political economy the causes and consequences of the economic and monetary union as a case where such an approach seems particularly useful, along with Eastern enlargements of 2004 and 2007. |