On consensus, constraint and choice: economic and monetary integration and Europe's welfare states

Date

2009-01-01

Author

Bolukbasi, H. Tolga

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

226
views

0
downloads

This article reassesses the theoretical expectations and empirical findings in the political economy literature on the impact of economic and monetary union (EMU) on European welfare states. After summarizing the literature which views EMU as the symbol of the primordial conversion to neoliberalism, the article identifies the underlying hypothesis, assumptions, and predictions of the earlier, largely apprehensive literature of the 1990s which was based on ex ante convictions on EMU's social consequences. Then it reviews more recent ex post studies pointing to dynamics of welfare state resilience informed by new empirical evidence that became available and new theoretical approaches that became influential. After highlighting the conditions under which welfare reforms have taken place and the role played by EMU in these processes, this article concludes by re-evaluating the earlier expectations in the literature in light of the empirical findings and draws lessons for the discipline of political economy.

Subject Keywords

Sociology and Political Science, Public Administration

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63546

Journal

JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13501760902872551

Collections

Economics and Administrative Sciences, Article

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

Straddling Two Continents: Social Policy and Welfare Politics in Turkey Aybars, Ayşe İdil (Wiley, 2010-12-01) There has been an increasing academic interest in understanding the dynamics of social policy in the Middle East and developing a conceptual 'model' to account for the particular characteristics of welfare arrangements in the countries of the region. While part of this framework, Turkey represents an exceptional case due to the Europeanization processes the country is undergoing in various policy areas, including social policy. The influence of the European Union on the shape of Turkish social policy, as il...
Challenging Geographical Disadvantages and Social Exclusion: A Case Study of Gendered Rural Transformation in Mountain Villages in the Western Black Sea Region of Turkey Him, Miki Suzuki; Hoşgör, Hatice Ayşe (Wiley, 2019-07-01) This article discusses the gender-specific effect of the changing economic structure of mountain villages in Turkey. Rural women, who are conventionally unpaid family workers, have begun entering into off-farm work due to declining household incomes in recent years. The implications of this for gender relations are found to be contradictory in much recent research. In this study, we employed the concepts of the hybridity of rural communities and the multiplicity of social exclusion in a globalising countrys...
Transformed landscapes and a transnational identity of class: Narratives on (post-)industrial landscapes in Europe Meier, Lars; Aytekin, Erden Attila (SAGE Publications, 2019-01-01) Based on 222 qualitative interviews conducted through a large ethnographic research project on transformed industrial landscapes in six countries, the main argument of the article is threefold. First, landscapes and narratives about past and present landscapes are relevant to the identity of class; second, the transformation of industrial landscapes is most emphatically expressed by nostalgia; third, the narratives are a transnationally constitutive element of class identity. The narratives of workers about...
The European Union's strategy towards the Western Balkans: Exclusion or integration? Türkeş, Mustafa (SAGE Publications, 2006-09-01) This article analyzes the European Union's strategy towards the Western Balkans as a hegemonic project. The European Commission's strategy is neither total exclusion nor rapid integration. The Commission's aim is to restructure the Western Balkans in line with neoliberalism to prepare the region for the "preincorporation stage." The Commission's major initiatives show that this neoliberal restructuring need not end in full membership but remains an open-ended process. Two components of the Commission's form...
The democratic deficit of the European Union : an institutionalist approach Kodakcı, Devrim; Gitmez, Ali; Department of European Studies (2004) This thesis analyses the democratic deficit problem of the European Union in a historical context. As the Union develops from a purely economic community into political and social entity, its democratic credentials are put into question. In this thesis, it is argued that technocratic and elitist institutional structure of the Union causes this democratic deficit. Therefore, in order to rectify it and make the Union more legitimate in the eyes of its citizens, the institutions of the Union should be re-struc...

Citation Formats

H. T. Bolukbasi, “On consensus, constraint and choice: economic and monetary integration and Europe’s welfare states,” JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY, pp. 527–544, 2009, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/63546.