POL41650

The 2008 financial crash, the euro crisis, Brexit, climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic have challenged the politics of European integration. These crises have exposed the fragility of joining diverse national economies into the EU, whilst illustrating distributive conflicts within nation-states and and between member-states. Against these contemporary challenges, the purpose of this course is to analyse the political economy of European integration, while paying particular attention to the euro area.

The course is taught in three parts. The first part examines the political and economic history of the European Union (EU), and the co-evolution of national varieties of capitalism within Europe post-WW2. It will be suggested that the EU was a regional response by sovereign nation-states to the international processes and constraints of globalisation. The second part examines the political and economic rationale for the establishment of the single market and the single currency; the brave new world of European central banking; and the difficulties of governing a single currency between sovereign nation-states. The final part of the course examines the political conflicts that underpin European integration, the politics of Brexit, euro scepticism, and changing dynamics of electoral conflict within the EU, and how the EU has responded to the global pandemic, and the climate emergency.

A core question that we will consider throughout the course is whether all of these events are bringing European nation-states closer together, or further apart. Is the EU moving toward ever closer union? Or more differentiated integration?