(Dis-)Continuities of European Economic Integration: Conflicts, Crises and Opposition

PROGRAMME

23/11/2023

14h
Welcome

14.15h
PANEL 1| CREATING, SHAPING AND CONTESTING “EUROPE”
Chair: Katharina Troll (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)
The London Moment: Financing Europeanism and Europeanising Finance – Financial Experts in exile during the Second World War 1939-1945
Lea Levenhagen (Universities Bayreuth and Bamberg)
Shaping European Financial Integration from the Shadows of the Dollar: The City of London as a Mediator in the Making of European Financial Infrastructure
Judith Koch (University of Sussex)
Britain and European Monetary Policy in the 1980s
Juliane Clegg (University Stuttgart)

16h
PANEL 2| CONTESTED SOVEREIGN DEBT IN THE EUROZONE
Chair: Pavlos Roufos (Berlin)
To Debt or not to Debt: The Rule of Technical Expertise over Off-Balance Sheet Policymaking in the European Union
Vanessa Endrejat (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)
The Commission as borrower – EU fiscal integration from contestation to normalization to contestation?
Inga Feldmann (Freie Universität Berlin)
Fiscal Space, Collateral, Security: On the Conceptualisation of Sovereign Creditworthiness
Carolin Müller (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)

24/11/2023

9.15h
PANEL 3 | MONETARY POLITICS IN TRANSITION
Chair: Vanessa Endrejat (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne)
Political Cultures of Money in the Eurozone
Anton Harms (Freie Universität Berlin)
Private Money Creation in the Monetary-Fiscal-Finance-Nexus
Luca Kokol (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)
The digital euro as an infrastructural integration project and the technopolitics of Europeanisation
David Hengsbach (Goethe University Frankfurt)

11.15h
PANEL 4 | SECTOR-SPECIFIC ENGAGEMENTS WITH “EUROPE”
Chair: Florian Schmidt (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)
European integration re-woven: British and West German textile employers’ associations and European integration, 1950-1980
Katharina Troll (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)
Made in Europe? The Nissan Bluebird dispute, local content, and the European single market for cars
Kenichi Meyer-Odrich (London School of Economics)
Banking Clubs and imagined futures of European integration during the 1970s and 80s
Johannes Sandhaeger (Humboldt University Berlin)

13h
PANEL 5| RESTRUCTURING EUROPEAN INTEGRATION
Chair: Carolin Müller (Hamburg Institute for Social Research)
Czech restructuring of trade relations in the late-socialist and post-socialist era
Luboš Studený (Charles University Prague)
Red Redemption? The Political Economy of the SPD’s rebalancing between the European Crises, and the different politics of fiscal and wage policy in the 2010s
Gabriele Beretta (Scuola Normale Superiore Florence)
The significance of epistemic communities in European integration and its consequences for critical opposition
Pavlos Roufos (Berlin)

14.30h
Concluding discussion

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Debt crisis, trade imbalances, inflation; in the public perception as well as in political circles, the European Union (EU) is increasingly perceived as a cause or driver rather than a mediator of multiple crises. “Eurosceptics” who question the concept of an ever-closer (economic) Union steadily gain in popularity. Countries like Greece – traditionally above average in favour of European integration – strongly question their endorsement since the so-called Euro crisis, while the United Kingdom decided to leave the EU altogether. One uniting element is the critical attitude to economic aspects of European integration.

However, when looking back at past decades of economic, fiscal and monetary integration, it gets clear that those contestations are by no means a new phenomenon. In fact, as early as the 1950s, integration used to cause conflict and opposition among economic actors. Hence, the EU was shaped by and is also a product of those criticizing it. Treating economic integration as a conflictual process is therefore indispensable for a broader understanding of recent crises. It also offers the possibility for more nuanced explanations of the struggles over a strengthening of economic ties, fiscal co-responsibilities or a concerted management of monetary shocks.