ABSTRACT
The global financial crisis of 2008 and the Eurozone crisis that followed suit confronted member states of the European Union (EU) with lasting questions about the present and future of their regional political economy. In particular, these crises uncovered many of the imperfections of a monetary union between countries with very diverse fiscal regimes. Consequently, various aspects of the European economic governance proved to be inadequate for efficient crisis-response, raising questions about spheres of competence, which, until then, had been sheltered from public debates and the logics of electoral politics. Therefore, the European multilevel system of governance has now entered a challenging phase, wherein the long-term project of a fully integrated single-market is increasingly challenged by popular discontent. In this setting, national politicians are stuck in an unprecedented tension between international institutional rules and domestic political demands; at the same time, supranational policy-makers are increasingly challenged with questions of democratic legitimacy. Our chapter on the political economy of the EU departs from this tension: at the core of our discussion lies the problem of integrating different types of national redistributive demands with the pressures for supranational policy-solutions.
