From Lisbon to Europe 2020: "Neoliberal European Governance in Crisis or Phoenix Arising?”

The global financial crisis has also in the European context raised the question whether or not we are witnessing a terminal crisis of the neoliberal project that has informed European socio-economic governance over the past decades. The acme of this neoliberal project, or more precisely what Bastiaan van Apeldoorn argues to be a project of ‘embedded neoliberalism’, and representing the core of European socio-economic regulation, thus far has been the Lisbon strategy. This strategy has now run its course, with mixed results at best. Now Europe 2020 has been launched as a successor, with again active support from European transnational capitalist class elite as organized in the European Round Table of Industrialists. Responding to the growing legitimacy crisis, the strategy coins new phrases such as ‘a new sustainable social market economy’ and ‘a smarter, greener economy’. Yet, as he will argue, with regard to social and employment policies, the message stays the same: more jobs can only be created ‘in exchange for greater adaptability’, that is, adaptability on the part of labour. As such, the neoliberal project is continued. Yet, in the longer run, the prospects of this project do not necessarily look good, in particular as the unfolding legitimacy crisis is compounded by a sovereign debt crisis that might yet derail the whole integration project.

Bastiaan van Apeldoorn is Reader in International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the VU University Amsterdam. His research interest lie within the tradition of transnational historical materialism, in particular, the changing political economy of European governance and, more recently, the rise of a new geopolitics within the context of changing global capitalist social relations. His publications include Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration (Routledge, 2002); Contradictions and Limits of European Neoliberal European Governance: From Lisbon to Lisbon (ed., Palgrave, 2009).

Organized by: Jean Monnet European Centre of Excellence

Registration: Sign up until 16th May, 2011 at coe.dbp@cbs.dk.