Integrating Political Economies in the Eurozone

This paper discusses how the European single market and monetary union promoted the German export-growth model as an economic standard among EU member-states.  It argues that recent economic developments in Continental Europe, since the late 2000s, can be interpreted as the emergence and development of an integrated growth regime. We argue that EU member states had different institutional assets which prompted different specializations i and growth strategies.  However, during the 1990s and 2000s, the strengthening of the Single European Market and the creation of European Monetary Union forced very different types of political economies into direct interaction and competition and removed many established instruments of protection and economic policy-making. We claim that after the crisis of the Eurozone, for most of Continental Europe (Eurozone plus Visegrad countries), policies and politics have converged on the German, export-driven, high quality, growth model. We further examine how the structure of the German growth model has informed the policy responses to the Eurozone crisis, and the implications of adopting the German growth model for the Continental European countries as a whole.