Moral Economies, Economic Moralities

University of California - Berkeley

U.S.A.

June 24 - 26, 2016

The international political economy of the European Union is still poorly understood. It has seen enormous changes after the international financial crisis, and the accompanying debt and banking crises. One of the key reasons why it is so badly understood is because there is relatively little interchange between traditional scholars of the EU (who tend to be inwardly focused on debates in political science), and scholars adopting sociological perspectives.

In this panel, we bring together a number of highly respected scholars to critically contribute to the conversation between international political economy and economic sociology about the political economy of the European Union.

Two papers - by Elliott Posner and Nicolas Veron, and by Abraham Newman and Nikhil Kalyanpur - contribute to an emerging debate on how the kinds of historical institutionalist perspectives developed by Kathy Thelen, Wolfgang Streeck and others can contribute to the understanding of international economic politics. Elliott Posner and Nicholas Veron show how these approaches shed valuable light on a traditional debate in European Union studies - whether the EU is becoming more internationalized over time. They use historical institutionalism to show how the EU is becoming less rather than more internationalist in its regulation of the financial sector. Abraham Newman and Nikhil Kalyanpur use a similar theoretic lens to look at the opposite question - how easy or difficult is it for internationalized actors such as foreign firms to intervene in EU internal politics. They use a valuable trove of leaked data on the positions of European and US businesses to trace their influence and perceived legitimacy in EU policy debates.

The other two papers - by Kathleen McNamara, and by Henry Farrell and John Quiggin - look instead at the role of culture and ideas in EU politics. Kathleen McNamara draws together the sociological literature on symbolic practices in markets and international political economy to understand how the authority of the EU becomes 'naturalized' in national spaces. This innovative paper shows how the arguments of economic sociology can be deployed to great effect in understanding transnational as well as national markets. Henry Farrell and John Quiggin draw instead on the sociological literature on professions to understand how debates among economists did or did not have consequences for policy debates during the disputes over Keynesianism in the wake of the recent recession.

These papers provide a practical demonstration of the value of bringing together ideas from economic sociology (and related arguments in comparative political economy) with the study of international political and market arrangements such as the European Union. The EU is a perfect testbed for such theories, combining complex international relations with a far thicker space of interactions than can be seen in many other international venues. While this limits the generalizability of these insights, it shows how new conversations can create new and striking insights.