ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 describes and analyses the process of global capitalist restructuring that has taken place since the 1970s – and the concomitant processes of globalisation and transnationalisation – and, within that context, then moves on to an analysis of the crisis of European order as it evolved in the early 1980s, which is here taken as the context in which the transnational struggle over European order evolved. In this historical account we will see how the European integration process first stagnated concomitant with the crisis of European capitalism, and was then relaunched from the mid-1980s onwards. Here, I will argue how within the context of the global and European crises, three contending projects crystallised as rival strategies for the relaunching of Europe. The struggle between these rival projects – identified as neo-liberalism, neo-mercantilism and ‘supranational social democracy’ – is here interpreted as a struggle over European socio-economic governance that as such has shaped the evolving socio-economic content of the (relaunched) integration process.
