The MAXCAP Working Paper No. 26 “Varieties of Dis-embedded Liberalism – EU Integration Strategies in the Eastern Peripheries of Europe” by László Bruszt and Julia Langbein has been published. You can download the Working Paper here.

The paper compares the European Union (EU)’s integration approach during the Eastern enlargement with the EU approach towards Eastern neighborhood countries. The authors argue that the EU has different goals and means for the management of its different peripheries resulting in deep, deep-light and shallow modes of market integration. In contrast to the post-1945 integration of Western Europe into the global economic system, coined by John Ruggie as embedded liberalism, the integration of the Eastern peripheries happens in the framework of a new liberal regional settlement. The latter takes large parts of the regulatory powers out of the hands of the states and compensates the dis-embedding of markets from national control to various degrees. The authors show that differences in political and economic interdependencies between the EU and the two Eastern peripheries explain the variation in integration strategies, and that each of them has its own weaknesses in terms of developmental effects.

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