ABSTRACT
The production of the present volume coincided with a moment of crisis in European Union (EU) socioeconomic governance. The experience of economic turmoil throughout the EU arising from the transmission of the credit crisis originating in the United States of America (US) in early 2008 was accompanied not only by the elaboration of a new grand strategic vision, or in Gramscian terms, a new hegemonic concept of control (Overbeek, 2004), for the EU as a whole under the label Europe 2020 (European Commission, 2010), but also the continuation of the enlargement of the Eurozone with Slovakia and Estonia joining the core of European economic and monetary arrangements in 2009 and 2011 respectively. The former sought to take stock of, and to overcome, the perceived limitations of the Lisbon Strategy of the preceding decade (Van Apeldoorn, Drahokoupil and Horn, 2009) in enhancing the competitiveness of the European space in an adverse context of demographic imbalances, US imperial overstretch and the rapid emergence of a multipolar world order in which the EU and the US are expected to share the centre stage of global policy-making with new poles of capital accumulation (the so-called BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China). The latter development, in turn, indicated in no uncertain terms the irresistible attraction exercised by the single currency project for local political and economic elites of the direct periphery of the EU, interpreted as a means of consolidating their countries’ integration into an Atlantic sphere of power and production relations, conceptualised in neo-Gramscian scholarship as a Lockean Heartland of transnational capitalism (Van der Pijl, 1998, in this book). 2
