"Constructing economic sovereignty: Embedded liberalism and neoliberalism in Europe"

Siegel, Scott. (2003) "Constructing economic sovereignty: Embedded liberalism and neoliberalism in Europe". In: UNSPECIFIED, Nashville, TN. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper provides an alternative explanatory framework based on the power of ideas in determining the forms of governance at different institutional levels within the EU. I argue that the institutional level at which authority over the economy is constructed will be a function of the interaction between ideas and the different political opportunity structures that are relatively open or closed to the incorporation of ideas. The constitutive norms that make up a state's authority over the economy account for the variation we see in the different levels of governance employed in contemporary Western Europe over the economy. Rather than assuming that the EU acts as a uniform site of supranational governance or whether it remains merely an international institution providing collective goods to its member states in an intergovernmentalist framework, this paper argues that we should accept the multi-faceted nature of European governance today and explain how and why national state sovereignty is becoming increasingly disembedded from its national territorial base and transferred to the supranational levels of governance.

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