This 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 nationaldomestic 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.

Bank ring-fencing is the attempt to separate 'higher risk' banking activities from those activities seen to be more socially useful to the real economy. It is also an important post-crisis regulatory response to the moral hazard dilemma surrounding Too Big To Fail banks. Since national governments bore the worst of the costs of rescuing the largest banks it is therefore reasonable to assume that the authorities would have the greatest incentive to promote tough ring-fence reform. In confrontation with the EU's Liikanen Group and the EU Commission however, France and Germany established a weaker set of national reforms. Our article asks why these national governments pursued a set of laws that were more accommodating to their largest banks than the EU proposals? We argue that France and Germany were defending market-based banking in their largest universal banks. What is most significant though is that they were therefore defending the ability of their largest banks to hold large volumes of trading assets which, in the view of the EU Commission and others, was a major cause of the financial crisis. Our conclusions have important implications for the Varieties of Capitalism literature and suggest that the direction of change in these countries will continue to be towards further marketbased banking, despite the associated costs revealed by the crisis.

The 2007–09 financial crisis has prompted critical self-reflection, not least because of the socioeconomic costs to more susceptible social groups. This paper targets public policy accounts of EU integration for their agent-centred, pluralist analysis, which systematically failed to address latent asymmetries and inequalities. For this reason, these accounts are largely incapable of either explaining the crisis except in contingent terms or of suggesting fruitful political responses. Instead I outline a historical materialist apparatus to contextualize the financial crisis within the longer-term rise of financialized capitalism in Europe, its key agents and dominant world-views. In turn, I employ this apparatus to examine post-2000 EU financial integration before suggesting certain key lessons for a post-crisis agenda.

Bank ring-fencing is the attempt to separate 'higher risk' banking activities from those activities seen to be more socially useful to the real economy. It is also an important post-crisis regulatory response to the moral hazard dilemma surrounding Too Big To Fail banks. Since national governments bore the worst of the costs of rescuing the largest banks it is therefore reasonable to assume that the authorities would have the greatest incentive to promote tough ring-fence reform. In confrontation with the EU's Liikanen Group and the EU Commission however, France and Germany established a weaker set of national reforms. Our article asks why these national governments pursued a set of laws that were more accommodating to their largest banks than the EU proposals? We argue that France and Germany were defending market-based banking in their largest universal banks. What is most significant though is that they were therefore defending the ability of their largest banks to hold large volumes of trading assets which, in the view of the EU Commission and others, was a major cause of the financial crisis. Our conclusions have important implications for the Varieties of Capitalism literature and suggest that the direction of change in these countries will continue to be towards further marketbased banking, despite the associated costs revealed by the crisis.

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