Kathleen R. McNamara (Georgetown University)
The Securitization of Market Competition? EU Economic Statecraft in the Age of Geopolitics
Wednesday, Jan 29; 16:00 - 17:30 | Download .ics
in person, registration required via info@mpifg.de
MPifG Cologne
(Paulstr.3, 50676 Cologne)
Abstract: Markets require rules, made and enforced by governments, and modern market-making has therefore unfolded as an intrinsic part of state-building. While the European Union is not a state, it has not been immune to these processes. Over the last three decades it has expanded its Single European Market and created a currency while constructing European political authority and deepening its institutional capacities. The EU has done this through supranational market-making largely centred on neoliberal precepts of competition and openness. Today, however, the EU is breaking with that tradition by pursuing a visibly interventionist European industrial policy and geopolitical market strategy. I suggest a theoretical framework to illuminate how this policy turn may reconfigure the EU’s political authority and build it as a polity. After briefly identifying the contours of the new European industrial and geoeconomic policy, I outline a research agenda to probe how the new market activism may reformulate societal interests and coalitions, increase the politicisation of the EU’s governing institutions, raise the stakes for democratic legitimation, and project the EU as a geopolitical actor. The conclusion notes how this new market-making translates into significant policy challenges for both the EU and the international economic order.
About the talk: Kathleen R. McNamara is Professor of Government and Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Her work focuses on globalization and the European Union, with a special interest in how politics, culture, and identity shape markets. At Georgetown, she co-directs the Global Political Economy Project, which seeks to reinvent the way we study global markets. In Spring 2023, she was the inaugural Simone Veil Fellow at the European University Institute, researching the EU’s new industrial policy and geopolitical shift. She has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a German Marshall Fund Fellow, a Fulbright Fellow, and taught at Princeton University and Sciences Po (Paris). She received the International Studies Association’s 2018 Distinguished Scholar in International Political Economy award and the ISA’s 2020 SWIPE Award for Mentoring Women in International Political Economy. Her books include The Politics of Everyday Europe: Constructing Authority in the European Union and The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union.
About the speaker: The European Union’s approach to market competition, historically based on promoting a level playing field, without state aid or market concentration, is undergoing significant changes. As originally enshrined in the treaties that built the Single European Market, the EU’s model emphasized neoliberal competition policies. However, competition is now being “securitized” in the EU, reshaped by geopolitical concerns rather than purely economic ones. This shift is reflected in new industrial policies and foreign economic strategies that merge market activism with security concerns. The change is surprising, as the EU was initially established as a peace project, not a traditional state with national interests. How will the intertwining of market and security logics shape the EU going forward?