Pollack, Mark A. (1998) Beyond left and right? Neoliberalism and regulated capitalism in the Treaty of Amsterdam. CES Working Paper, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998. [Policy Paper]
Abstract
[From the Introduction]. ...this chapter examines the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, asking whether the new treaty represents an advance or a setback to the respective projects of neoliberalism or regulated capitalism. Before moving to the Treaty of Amsterdam, however, I begin by surveying, all too briefly, the three most important constitutive treaties in the history of the European Community/Union, namely the Treaties of Rome (1957), the Single European Act (1986), and the Maastricht Treaty (1992). The basic argument here is straightforward: From Rome to Maastricht, the fundamental thrust of the treaties has been neoliberal, in the sense that each of the Community’s constitutive treaties facilitated the creation of a unified European market, while setting considerable institutional barriers to the regulation of that same market. The Treaty of Rome, for example, featured important powers for the EEC in the areas of free movement, competition policy, and external trade policy, while granting the Community few powers of positive regulation and only a modestly redistributive Common Agricultural Policy. The Single European Act picked up this basic theme, focusing primarily on the completion of the internal market by 1992, and limiting institutional reforms largely to this goal. And the Maastricht Treaty focused primarily on the project for Economic and Monetary Union, which has turned out to be a neoliberal project in effect if not in its original conception.
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