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8 - Competition versus Planning: A Battle That Shaped European Integration

from Money and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2023

By
Laurent Warlouzet
Edited by
Mathieu Segers  and
Steven Van Hecke
Mathieu Segers
Affiliation:
Universiteit Maastricht, Netherlands
Steven Van Hecke
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
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Summary

The European Union (EU) and its forerunner, the European Economic Community (EEC), have been economically organised around a market-oriented philosophy, which has been fed by a constant debate between two opposite poles: indicative planning and competition. This chapter will revisit the history of internal European economic policies, notably in the monetary, industrial and competition realms, by demonstrating that European institutions have usually carried on thanks to successive compromises between planning and competition and that, despite the latter’s rise since the 1990s, the contest is not yet over, especially since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.

More generally, the debate between planning and competition echoes the long-term controversy between the promoters of free trade and those who are willing to bend free-market rules.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the European Union , pp. 234 - 260
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Recommended Reading

Gerber, D. Law and Competition in XXth Century Europe: Protecting Prometheus (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Leucht, B., Seidel, K. and Warlouzet, L. (eds.). Reinventing Europe: The History of the European Union since 1945 (London, Bloomsbury, 2022).Google Scholar
Milward, A. S. The European Rescue of the Nation-State (London, Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar
Moravcsik, A. The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Shonfield, A. Modern Capitalism: The Changing Balance of Public and Private Power (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1965).Google Scholar
Slobodian, Q. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2018).Google Scholar
Warlouzet, L. Europe contre Europe: Entre liberté, solidarité et puissance (Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2022).Google Scholar
Warlouzet, L. Governing Europe in a Globalizing World: Neoliberalism and Its Alternatives Following the 1973 Oil Crisis (London, Routledge, 2018).Google Scholar
Warlouzet, L. ‘The EEC/EU as an Evolving Compromise between French Dirigism and German Ordoliberalism (1957–1995)’, Journal of Common Market Studies 57 (2019): 77–93.Google Scholar

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