Euro-Capitalism and American Empire

For some two decades now, progressive American, British and Canadian intellectuals, determined to resist neoliberalism’s ‘there-is-no-alternative’ mantra, have looked to continental Europe for an alternative model. One virtue of this academic and political project — which within the field of comparative political economy has now come to be known as the ‘varieties of capitalism’ or VoC approach — has been that it challenged the notion that capitalist globalization inevitably needed to take the form it has, apparently entailing, as so many of its proponents imagined, the growing impotence of nation states and the increasing homogenization of social formations. The insistence on variety among states has meant trying to refocus attention on the continuing salience of institutional arrangements and social relations specific to particular social formations and their histories, the very dimensions largely ignored in the equations of neoclassical economics and the policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Above all, this approach has suggested that whether and how societies adapt themselves to global competition remains an open and important question.