ABSTRACT
Today’s European Union is commonly viewed as one of the great concrete triumphs of the neoliberal shared mental model – or at least it should be. A fair number of observers describe the EU as a ‘Fortress Europe’ of protectionist agricultural policies, rigid regulations, and onerous bureaucracy, when in fact these facets are best understood as secondary elements or side-payments in a fundamentally neoliberal enterprise. There remain many things for neoliberals to complain about in Europe, of course. But especially with the ‘Single Market 1992’ and monetary union projects launched in the 1980s and 1990s, Europe has been reorganized to more closely reflect neoliberal principles of competition, price arbitrage, and public policies that favour background economic stability over active intervention in markets.
