Variegated neo-liberalism: transnationally oriented fractions of capital in EU financial market integration

Abstract

AbstractThis article develops a twofold critique: on the one hand it addresses those accounts commonly associated with the Varieties of Capitalism literature and their associated understanding of neo-liberalism to argue that there is a dominant tendency to collapse into a binary analysis that asserts either we are witnessing convergence or we are experiencing path dependency. On the other hand it addresses ‘neo-Gramscian’ accounts which tend to overemphasise processes of transnational convergence and the emergence of a transnational capitalist class at the expense of the embeddedness of capital in national-domestic contexts. On this basis, it is argued that several contributions within political geography pose meaningful questions about the premise that neo-liberalism is inherently variegated. Principally, this involves developing the notion of variegated neo-liberalism to analyse the dynamics of a contingent neo-liberal consensus between transnationally-oriented fractions that both drives EU reform in a neo-liberal direction and reinforces domestic linkages organic to the national context. As a result, the article suggests we therefore reject the notion of a transnational capitalist class somehow detached from the national.