While the consequences of becoming an EU member state for national policies are usually the core concern of pre-membership debates and of post-accession assessments, studies on the effects of European integration on the political systems of the now fifteen member states have so far been less...

In a recent article, Caporaso and Tarrow have argued that the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) is increasingly moving in a social policy direction that will ultimately put European politics on a “Polanyian” course. We take issue with their claim and distinguish three...

At first glance, the social purpose and the democratic potential of the EU have made progress in the last 15 years. However, this impression is misleading. We argue instead that the social and democratic potentials of the EU are crucially shaped by the heterogeneity of European varieties of...

The European Monetary Union (EMU) has removed crucial instruments of macroeconomic management from the control of democratically accountable governments. Worse still, the EMU has systemically caused destabilizing macroeconomic imbalances that member states found difficult or impossible to...

Auf dem Hintergrund ideengeschichtlicher Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Markt und Staat wird nach den Ursachen der beständigen Kooperationsprobleme gefragt, mit denen es die Europäische Union zu tun hat, wenn für alle Mitgliedstaaten verbindliche Entscheidungen getroffen werden sollen. Die...

The rise of the consolidation state follows the displacement of the classical tax state, or Steuerstaat, by what I have called the debt state, a process that began in the 1980s in all rich capitalist democracies. Consolidation is the contemporary response to the "fiscal crisis of the state"...

Recent literature on the European debt crisis emphasizes that rising external trade and lending imbalances between the European Monetary Union's (EMU) Northern and Southern member states served as a crucial determinant behind speculative divergence between these two regions. However, these...