 Polanyi in Brussels: European institutions and the embedding of markets in societyJames Caporaso and Sidney Tarrow No 1, RECON Online Working Papers Series from RECON Abstract: This paper returns to Karl Polanyi and to the logic of his The Great Transformation to understand some otherwise puzzling contradictions in the construction of the European single market. On the one hand, the European project appears to look to the creation of a single market that is detached from national political economies, whether these are liberal or coordinated; on the other, European institutions appear to work towards the embedding of markets in society. Our use of the Polanyian term ‘embed’ may surprise readers who have come to think of the EU as a fundamentally disembedding agency, through the priority it accords to economic efficiency. But although the central rationale for the EU is to foster freedom of movement in goods, services, and productive factors, we see the EU as multivocal, reflecting essentially political logics, and not easily reduced to the institutional expression of market liberalization. We use a series of cases from the European Court of Justice’s treatment of free movement of labour to describe the lineaments of a movement/countermovement interaction at the transnational level not unlike the one that Polanyi discerned in England at the national level in the early 19th century. Keywords: European Court of Justice; free movement; institutions; labour contract; political economy; regulations; Single Market (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:erp:reconx:p0020 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in RECON Online Working Papers Series from RECON |
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