Beyond Varieties of Capitalism: Conflict, Contradictions, and Complementarities in the European Economy

Since the early 1990s, Europe's economies have been facing several new challenges: the 1992 single market programme, the collapse of the Berlin wall and eastward enlargement, and monetary unification. Building on the influential Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) perspective, first elaboarted in detail in the book Varieties of Capitalism OUP, 2001), this book critically analyzes these developments in the European political economy and their effects on the continental European economies.
Leading political economists from Europe and the US debate how VoC can help understand the political-economic challenges that Europe is facing today and how understanding these new challenges can in turn enrich and enhance the VoC perspective. Thematically, the contributions to this volume are organised in four sections:
* how the macro-economics of EMU influenced different European models of capitalism,
* how the Single Market programme was received in the different institutional regimes in European capitalism,
* how welfare and labour market reforms are debated and implemented,
* how European capitalism travelled east after 1989.
Preceding this is a spirited defence of the VoC approach by Peter Hall, and an introduction from the volume editors, considering the approach, and proposing extensions and amendments. This book demonstrates that the VoC approach remains, as the editors put it in their introduction, a rich seam to mine, capable of accommodating new developments, and theoretically flexible enough to branch out into new arguments.