Searching for actually existing neoliberalism in Wolfgang Streeck’s crisis theory

Abstract

Wolfgang Streeck’s crisis theory is built around a critical discussion of neoliberalism. Conceptually, Streeck associates neoliberalism with spiralling disorder while, empirically, he views the forging of a common market in the European Union and its forerunners as the most comprehensive institutional realization of neoliberal world-making. In reconciling the conceptual and empirical dimensions of his crisis theory, Streeck constructs a historiographical narrative in which European Union market integration exemplifies runaway trade liberalization and globalization effected through regulatory stripping and driven forward by a solidaristic and unbound capitalist class. A more realistic picture of the integration process would need to do considerably more to also register the varieties of highly regulated ‘positive integration’ that have dominated the integration process over time, the many disruptions to global market flows and competition created through this ordered institutional field, and fragmentation among the plurality of actors that have been responsible for both the market opening and market constraint characteristic of it. As things stand, the historiographical settlement between theory and observation in Streeck’s crisis theory comes at the cost of an excessively casual empiricism that obscures as much as it reveals, with potentially harmful political implications.