The Political Economy of Competitiveness and Continuous Adjustment in EU Meta-Governance

Abstract

This article asserts that attempts to resolve the crisis through recent changes in European meta-governance are just the latest phase in a project to secure “continual adjustment” in European societies to the systemic demands of competitiveness. The structural pressures experienced at the scale of European societies are located in the process and scale of world market integration. This New Materialist scalar-relational approach sees adjustment to the systemic demands of competitiveness as likely to continue into the future and suggests that the scope for alternative more Keynesian programs of reform through EU meta-governance is highly constrained.

Keywords:

• adjustment
• competitiveness
• Europe 2020
• proletarianization
• scale

Notes

¹ World Bank, World Development Indicator Dataset: Urban Population as % of total, World, see Retrieved from http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS.

² Not all countries are signatories to all these packs and pacts. Participants are as follows: Euro-Pact Plus: all MS to varying extents except CZ, HU, SE, UK; Six Pack: all 28 MS; TSCG: 26 MS (except UK, CZ); two-Pack: Eurozone only.

³ http://www.u-multirank.eu/

⁴ For some background on the idea of scarring, see Arulampalam (2001), Arulampalam, Booth, & Taylor (2000), Blanchard & Diamond (1994), Gregg (2001), Machin & Manning (1999) and Nunn, Bickerstaffe, Hogarth, & Green (2010).