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"Matthijs, Matthias"
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Ever tighter union? Brexit, Grexit, and frustrated differentiation in the single market and Eurozone
Many European political leaders and observers have argued that the European Union’s multiple recent challenges call for more “differentiated integration.” At first glance, the EU may seem to lend itself quite well to such an approach, with already variegated memberships in the Euro area or Schengen borderless travel zone. What proponents of differentiation tend to overlook, however, is that the Union’s core commitments are not set up to permit much internal variation at all. Indeed, in the EU’s two flagship policy areas—the Single Market and the Eurozone—the defining institutional principles rule out differentiation to a striking degree. To substantiate this claim, we show that the rules in these areas are considerably more constraining of EU member states than are analogous federal constraints within the USA. We then highlight how these tightly limiting principles of EU economic governance have shaped recent negotiations with Greece in the Eurozone and the UK in the Single Market. While the EU’s core constraining principles make calls for differentiation all the more comprehensible, they also underscore that differentiated options may require rather fundamental change to the current institutional status quo.
Journal Article
Black Swans, Lame Ducks, and the mystery of IPE's missing macroeconomy
Britain's BREXIT vote and Trump's victory in the US presidential elections sent shockwaves through the Western liberal establishment, including academia. Both events suggest yet another 'rethinking' of International Political Economy (IPE). Yet we have been here before. After the global financial crisis of 2008, 'Open Economy Politics' (OEP) was criticized for being unable to either anticipate or adequately explain the global financial crisis. Now that IPE has been caught short twice in a decade, any rethinking must go beyond critique and beyond OEP. To stop being surprised, we argue that IPE needs to shift its focus from micro-foundations back to macro-effects. IPE today strangely lacks an appreciation for the global macroeconomics that drives the outcomes it has such difficulty explaining, such as recurring financial bubbles, increasing levels of inequality, and the global rise of populism. Bringing the global macroeconomy back into the IPE, we argue, is a necessary corrective.
Journal Article
When Is It Rational to Learn the Wrong Lessons? Technocratic Authority, Social Learning, and Euro Fragility
Why do bad policy ideas persist over time? We trace the development of the euro’s governing ideas over fiscal and monetary policy in the face of mounting evidence that continued adherence to those ideas was economically deleterious. We argue that a specific form of social learning, framed by a retrospective recoding in 2010–2012 of Europe’s experience with fiscal rules in 2003–2005, drove European elites to pursue policies that were economically irrational but politically rational. As a result, the Eurozone’s medium-term resilience has been made possible by the European Central Bank’s unconventional and loose monetary policies, which operate in direct opposition to the tight fiscal policies of its member states’ governments. We maintain that this self-defeating macroeconomic policy mix will continue as long as the lessons learned by policymakers are driven by the need to win what we term an authority contest, rather than provide better macroeconomic outcomes.
Journal Article
Mediterranean Blues: The Crisis in Southern Europe
The design of Europe's monetary union was flawed in that it works in a similar way to the interwar gold standard. With deflation the only viable option in response to crises, the burden of adjustment falls mainly on workers and debtors in deficit countries, while letting surplus countries off the hook. The euro crisis has thus not only led to a widening North-South gap within Europe, but also to an erosion of democratic legitimacy in the periphery. This has been manifested by the emergence of new antiestablishment parties and plummeting popular support for the EU in southern Europe. Voters have reacted to what they perceive as Brussels' encroachment on their national sovereignty and seeming failure to comply with democratic principles.
Journal Article
Integration at What Price? The Erosion of National Democracy in the Euro Periphery
The euro crisis brought back a widening gap in prosperity between the eurozone’s core and periphery members, but also revealed a divergence in the strength of its national democracies. This article examines the amplified tension between progressively uprooted national markets governed by a supranational technocracy and nationally organized democratic politics in the eurozone’s periphery. Building on Dani Rodrik’s globalization ‘trilemma’, this article explains the weakening of national democratic institutions in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy since 2008. While the periphery states were forced to choose monetary integration at the expense of both democracy and sovereignty, this trade-off was mostly absent in the core. The eurozone’s policy solutions to the crisis did not allow for any democratic input, were implemented through opaque and often-undemocratic throughput processes, and resulted in deteriorating output. The article concludes that the EU crisis response made euro membership in the periphery less compatible with national democratic principles.
Journal Article
Rethinking Central-Bank Independence
How can central-bank independence be reconciled with the modern need for political accountability in times of unconventional monetary policy and increased financial-oversight powers? The world experienced a startling convergence toward central-bank independence during the 1990s, as interests and ideas combined to make the notion into a virtually uncontested institutional norm. The ensuing boom years added credibility to the view that technocrats were superior to politicians in dealing with monetary affairs. The global financial crisis, however, exposed central bankers as powerful political actors rather than mere technocrats. Moving far beyond their narrow mandates, they became more overtly distributive and increasingly politicized agents. While unconventional monetary policy and financial supervision offer short-term benefits, they create future uncertainty and raise questions of political accountability. This paper argues that central banks will need to channel contestation over monetary policy into a more conventional political arena if they are to maintain their democratic legitimacy.
Journal Article
Ideas and Economic Crises in Britain from Attlee to Blair (1945-2005)
During the period from 1945 to 2005, Britain underwent two deep-seated institutional transformations when political elites successfully challenged the prevailing wisdom on how to govern the economy. Attlee and Thatcher were able to effectively implement most of their political platforms. During this period there were also two opportunities to challenge existing institutional arrangements. Heath's 'U-turn' in 1972 signalled his failure to implement the radical agenda promised upon election in 1970, whilst Tony Blair's New Labour similarly failed to instigate a major break with the 'Thatcherite' settlement.
Rather than simply retell the story of British economic policymaking since World War II, this book offers a theoretically informed version of events, which draws upon the literatures on institutional path dependence, economic constructivism and political economy to explain this puzzle. It will be of great interest to both researchers and postgraduates with an interest in British economic history and the fields of political economy and economic crisis more widely.
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