Paradigm Shift Ahead? EU Industrial Policy and the European Green Dela in the Neoliberal Era
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2020-06-27
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en
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The recent EU industrial strategies and the European Green Deal are a source of continuous academic discussion. By employing a Critical Political Economy (CPE) approach, the present thesis argues that these policies did not provoke a paradigm shift away from the longstanding neoliberal hegemony. Instead, transnational industrial alliances managed to promote their neoliberal interests with some neomercantilist elements by inserting green growth into their logic. This happened in response to their declining material position, reinforced by the 2007/8 global and financial shock and the current ecological crisis. Industrial agents had greater access to decision-makers within the European Commission than environmental organizations or the progressive left, which becomes especially visible when tracing the meetings of selected agents with the Commission, and comparing the wording between industrial position papers and EU policies. Thus, the European Commission sidelined calls for structural change, and strategically selected industrial interests over socio-ecological transformative ones that worked as a counter-hegemony project to the current paradigm. These insights are gained by methods like ideal-type comparison, the historical materialist policy analysis, process tracing, and extensive analysis of primary documents.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen