ABSTRACT
Historical materialist perspectives have grown in importance in the analysis of European integration since the early 1990s. This chapter presents a historical materialist approach and argues that it is uniquely placed in unravelling the underlying social purpose of integration especially from the mid-1980s and early 1990s onwards against the background of wider restructuring taking place within the global political economy. It introduces a number of key Marxist concepts, including a focus on the internal relations between class agency and the structuring conditions of the capitalist social relations of production, the centrality of class struggle, processes of uneven and combined development as well as hegemony and hegemonic project. After unsuccessful attempts by European states to cope on their own with worldwide recession during the 1970s, European integration was revived from the mid-1980s onwards around the Internal Market programme.
