US power and the crisis of social democracy in Europe's second project of integration

In: Capital & class, Volume 31, Issue 3, p. 7-26

Abstract

This article draws on the work of Poulantzas to argue that European social democracy is in crisis because European integration since the 1980s has been articulated within a relationship of structural subordination to US-led globalised financial capital, to which European capital has itself increasingly gravitated. This has also been the determining parameter of the state-as-social-relation, and contradicts the post-war welfare settlement. Against this backdrop, Europe has struggled to rearticulate a new social compromise and politics of social mediation. The attendant crisis of legitimisation has primarily benefited right-wing populism, which does not augur well for the health of Europe's synthesis of capitalism with democracy.