ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades critical political economy (CPE) scholars have made significant advances to our understanding of European integration. The left melancholy of the established CPE account of European integration is reflected in more recent accounts of the European crises that erupted in 2008. Our central argument, therefore, is that the European crisis is characterized by three interrelated developments: First, an intensification of disciplinary or authoritarian neoliberalism that seeks to further reduce fiscal capacity of EU member states, combined with hardening of the European ensemble of state apparatuses due to new forms of authoritarian crisis constitutionalism. Second, a trend towards disembedding the market that forms part of a move towards the construction of 'descent societies' characterized by increased social polarization and everyday vulnerability. Third, a flaring up of community organizing, process in which new pragmatically prefigurative subjectivities and spaces of presentist democracy are constituted and which have witnessed non-standard forms of conflict, civil disobedience and self-enforcement of social rights.
