Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal European Governance: From Lisbon to Lisbon

This ambitious volume analyses the contradictions and tensions at the heart of European integration, economically as well as politically, and reveals the surprising ways in which these contradictions and tensions have manifested themselves. Concerned with the systemic logic or, indeed, illogic of European governance, it seeks to de-naturalize and deconstruct neoliberalism in the European Union. The contributions illustrate the complicity of key social forces in the spread of neoliberalism and finance-led economic strategies and identify the more or less active strategic role of specific social forces in establishing, guiding, mediating, or resisting its logic.

The individual chapters include analyses of the changing geopolitical and geo-economic context; the politics of welfare state retrenchment, the Lisbon agenda; the struggle over banking and corporate governance regulation; the Eastward expansion of the EU; and of the contestation and mobilization against the European project, such as manifested in the national resistance against the Constitution as well as several other instances of (trans)national resistance.