No abstract

No abstract

Historical-materialist policy analysis (HMPA) aims at analyzing how specific policies are formulated against the background of essentially competing and contradictory interests of different social forces. It examines how, if at all, these policies contribute to societal reproduction and the regulation of social contradictions and crisis tendencies. This article provides a concise introduction to HMPA as well as to the key theoretical concepts and perspectives underpinning its policy concept. Against this background, it further elaborates on how to operationalize HMPA for empirical research, drawing on but also going beyond the three-step process of context-, actors-and process-analysis suggested by the Research Group 'State Project Europe'. In this way, we seek to enhance the analytical and methodological repertoire of historical materialist political science, and at the same time open up new analytical perspectives within the comprehensive field of critical policy analysis.

The negotiations over the Eurozone crisis have increasingly come to reflect Poulantzas’ idea of ‘authoritarian statism’, i.e., a decline in the relevance of democratic institutions and a shift in political power towards technical state apparatuses. Yet, scholarly approaches to transnational integration have provided little guidance as to why monetary relations have become such a pronounced point of condensation for the contradictions inherent in European integration. While mainstream theories of monetary unions such as optimal currency area theory neglect the impact of state power and class interests on monetary politics, more critical perspectives on transnational integration have paid insufficient attention to monetary governance and its role in the mediation of international relations. The present paper brings heterodox theories of international relations and monetary integration to bear on the increasingly authoritarian dynamics of Eurozone governance. Reflecting on Bruff’s discussion of authoritarian neoliberalism, we proceed to examine how the circumvention of democratic institutions via Eurozone monetary governance is more precisely captured through the notion of transnational authoritarian statism. We develop this concept in relation to two historical periods of European integration: the formation of the Economic and Monetary Union and the recent extension of the European Central Bank’s scope of monetary governance.

No abstract