European integration as accumulation strategy: The European integration policy of the Federation of German Industries (BDI) from Eurosclerosis to Economic and Monetary Union.

摘要

Building on a critique of contemporary critical political economy literature on European integration, this dissertation develops a non-reductionist and non-structuralist approach that can be used in the analysis of capitalist class-based agency, and offers a detailed case study of the European policy formulated and pursued by one agent, the Federation of German Industries (BDI), in relation to its more general political-economic strategy. It argues that, in order to effectively eliminate structuralism and economic reductionism in interpretations of the strategies pursued by class-based agents, their economic interests or strategies cannot be seen as flowing directly from their position in the socio-economic structure. Research must focus, therefore, on the processes by which people come to be aware and assess the socio-economic structure they are part of and by which they form collective political-economic agents and formulate strategies based on it, with ideas and organizational factors playing a central role in these processes.; The empirical analysis consists of two parts. The first situates the BDI in the postwar (West) German political economy and examines its response to the profound crisis of profitability and investment experienced by West German industry in the 1960s and 1970s. The BDI formulated a neoliberal accumulation strategy, which built on the export-oriented growth model that dominated the West German political economy after World War II and which was informed by supply-side economics and later by monetarist theory, as well as by German Ordo-liberalism which emphasized the importance of an overall state-regulatory framework for accumulation. The second part of the analysis examines the BDI's overall European integration policy from the 1970s to the mid-1990s and explains it in relation to this neoliberal accumulation strategy. It demonstrates that the BDI's European policy cannot be understood simply as a product of the economic interests of German industry or its dominant sectors.