| Review of: | Enlarging the Euro Area: External Empowerment and Domestic Transformation in East Central Europe edited by K. Dyson |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Andreas Bieler |
| Reviewed in: | Journal of Common Market Studies |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 45, Issue 03, Pages 745-769 |
Book Reviews
Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) membership, while not linked to a specific date, was made obligatory in the accession treaties. Enlargement of the European Union (EU) to central and eastern Europe (CEE) has been extensively covered including the transformation in CEE countries, the response by the EU, as well as the way we can understand these processes theoretically. Missing, however, was an analysis of the implications of future EMU membership for CEE countries. This book fills this gap. The strength of the volume lies in the comprehensiveness of its analysis. Part I covers the location of EMU within the wider developments of the global economy. Part II deals with many of the new EU members including the Baltic States, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Only the exclusion of Slovenia, the first country to join EMU in January 2007, is surprising. The book is then completed with an investigation of several patterns of sectoral governance including financial markets, fiscal policy and welfare state adjustment.
Nevertheless, while highly important, this book also demonstrates a core weakness characteristic of so much current scholarship on European integration. Neo-liberal restructuring, which has driven the integration process since the mid-1980s around the Internal Market and EMU, is taken for granted. Since the early 1990s, inequality has increased in CEE, unemployment levels remain high and employment rates are lower than in the EU-15. Nevertheless, a critical dimension, analysing who in CEE loses out in neo-liberal restructuring, is missing in this volume. The neo-liberal purpose of EMU is clearly recognized. Jim Rollo in Chapter 2, for example, outlines how the EU and EMU have become part and parcel of the neo-liberal, so-called Washington Consensus in the 1990s and how EU membership pushed CEE countries along this road (p. 48). With the exception of the chapter on Hungary by Béla Greskovits, however, there is hardly any engagement with domestic conflicts over monetary politics. Instead, the focus is on elites and how they negotiate the fit between external pressures and domestic constraints. Those countries which move quickest towards EMU membership are described as pacesetters, those who are behind are called laggards. Speedy compliance with neo-liberal restructuring is, thus, understood as a positive step, reluctance as backwards.
The lack of critical engagement with neo-liberalism is even more surprising when considering recent challenges of restructuring within the EU. The 'no' to the EU constitution in the Dutch and French referendums in 2005 was also due to the Constitutional Treaty's neo-liberal contents. Moreover, around the European Social Forums, the meetings of anti-neo-liberal globalization groups in Europe since 2002, alliances have formed with the objective of resisting further neo-liberal restructuring. It would be important to investigate how these struggles over the future EU model of capitalism are played out in CEE in view of pending EMU membership. A look beyond governing elites is, therefore, highly important. By not engaging with these issues, this book constitutes neo-liberal statecraft thereby normalizing restructuring as common sense.