ABSTRACT

In this chapter, the authors show that historical materialism provides a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the origins of the European Union, the transition to the neoliberal or second project of European integration, and its contemporary crisis. Notwithstanding the proliferation of competing analytical models, mainstream International Political Economy (IPE) scholarship has not fundamentally transcended its original realist/idealist dichotomy. Thus, 'integration', which is fundamentally associated with the market and its administration, is understood as a largely self-stabilizing and benevolent process that expresses the inherent rational potentials of human nature. The core concept that the Amsterdam School uses to explore transnational class formation – comprehensive concepts of control – is informed by these insights, but it takes the argument further: in his seminal work, Kees van der Pijl (1984) placed the strategies of agents that form accumulation regimes and underpin successive hegemonies at the centre of analysis.