Abstract
Since the onset of the financial crisis in 2007-8, through to the Eurozone crisis which began in 2010, there has been much discussion about the political economic trajectory taken since the 1970s. This period has been dominated by neoliberal ideas, and it would have seemed sensible that over the last half a decade the lack of efficacy in producing sustained and equitable outcomes, both economically and socially, would have sounded their death-knell. However, in this volume edited by Vivien Schmidt and Mark Thatcher, it is argued that this has not been the case: neoliberalism continues to reign supreme. The primary aim of this volume is therefore to explain this resilience.
In the initial chapter of Resilient Liberalism in Europe's Political Economy, Schmidt and Thatcher lay out much of the framework used to pursue the above aim. Neoliberalism is considered to be a political project to restore capitalist class power against the gains of labour, with ‘watchwords’ including ‘liberalisation’, ‘privatisation’, ‘commodification’ and ‘competition’. Utilising discursive institutionalism, they seek to understand how neoliberal ideas are situated at various levels, including philosophical assumptions, in order to provide some kind of worldview – paradigmatic ideas about macro-economic policies and Keynesian versus neoliberalism, for instance – and to specific policy programmes such as corporate governance. These ideas are then analysed against five lines of resilience, including the flexibility of neoliberalism, the gaps between rhetoric and reality, the strength of discourse in debates, the power of particular interests and institutional embeddedness. The individual chapters focus on particular issues including fiscal conservatism, the welfare state, the state in a broader sense, the euro, regulation of markets, financial regulation, labour markets and corporate governance. This is along with a specific country focus as appropriate, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, and Central and Eastern Europe. Much of the debate that takes place emphasises neoliberalism's resilience through the first two hypotheses – namely its flexibility and the gap between rhetoric and reality.
While there are a number of convincing accounts, the volume brings to the fore the persistent problem with an exclusive focus on ideas. It leads us to wonder how a wider material reality, the exploitative dynamics of capitalist accumulation, assist and possibly constitute the resilience of such ideas in the first place. In essence, more interaction with critical perspectives on the development of Europe's political economy may hold the key, in future, to providing a more holistic, and therefore more satisfactory, account of neoliberalism's success – past, present and possibly future.