From the Sovereign Debt Crisis to Authoritarian Statism: Contradictions of the European State Project

The recent sovereign debt crisis in Europe appears to have consolidated the ideological and the historical actuality of the European state project, but not in the manner that many of its advocates would have hoped. Far from deepening democratisation, what has emerged instead is a political terrain increasingly reminiscent of what Nicos Poulantzas termed 'authoritarian statism'. The present article aims to illuminate this phenomenon in relation to the institutional shifts within the EU that both preceded and followed the debt crisis, as well as in relation to the historical processes of uneven and combined development that form the ground upon which the European state project has been erected. Our overarching goal is to theorise the EU as a manifestation of contradictory tendencies towards transnationalisation within which elements of nation-states play a constitutive role, but one that simultaneously exacerbates Europe's crisis tendencies. It is this intractable tension within the internal structure of the EU that has given rise to a transnational authoritarian statism across Europe expressed in a 'strengthening-weakening' of state power, i.e. a reinforcement of state authority that simultaneously expresses and exacerbates the political crisis to which it seeks to respond.