The Discovery of (a European) Society? - A Polanyian appraisal of European integration after the Maastricht Treaty

Abstract

Abstract The ongoing Eurocrisis expresses the limits of an institutional setup designed to run the Euro as commodity money and to organize labour into competitive markets. Building on Polanyi’s (1944) claim that “a market economy can exist only in a market society”, this paper approaches the project of European integration “as an instituted process” (Polanyi, 1957) of enactment of a market economy embedded in a market society. Section 1 builds a polanyian framework, with particular focus on the theoretical tension between the notions of market disembeddedness and embeddedness in a market society. Section 2 presents the structure of European multilevel governance as an institutional blueprint of market disembeddedness. A third section explores the dynamics of translation of the European Market Economy into a European Market Society. The paper concludes by arguing that a solution to the Eurocrisis that is both Europeanist and democratic will require replacing the liberal ethos of the market for the public sphere, as rationale for the European society embedding the European economy.