This is an excellent book that deserves a wide audience of political scientists, economists, and policymakers. It is ambitious, insightful, novel, and persuasive and should stand the test of time.
The achievements of Playing the Market are all the more impressive considering the overwhelming size of the scholarly literature on European integration. The fatigue among consumers of this literature is such that many believe, surely, that one more book on the integration project could not possibly be illuminating. Nicolas Jabko's book demonstrates otherwise: Students of the political economy of Europe are obliged to read at least one more book. It is essential reading.
Jabko manages to resolve some extraordinary puzzles: How can critics and supporters of the European Union possibly be talking about the same organization when, alternately, they describe a “neoliberal” agent for marketization and an omnipresent, emergent leviathan? Why has the European Commission undertaken an agenda of liberal unity that threatens to undermine public support for the integration project? Jabko's provocative but ultimately persuasive arguments are nuanced and clear. Most fundamentally, the invocation of “the market” was a political strategy employed by Europe's most enthusiastic proponents—and particularly those in the Commission—that simultaneously liberalized markets and created powerful bureaucratic authority at the European level. This strategy, far from the dictates of neoliberal ideology, represented a calculated risk on the part of those most committed to the European cause. In a sense, as at the founding of the integration project in the middle of the 1950s, those who sought to rejuvenate Europe used economic means for largely political ends. Today's ongoing European debate about the project emphasizes these very ends and means and the way in which they may have become confused.
Jabko narrates the unfolding of the strategy through four case studies, each of which represents a different “repertoire” of the market. His outstanding account of the emergence of a single financial area emphasizes the notion of the market as a constraint, a reality to which Europe simply, as the rhetoric suggested at least, had to accommodate itself. For an internal energy market, however, the Commission emphasized the market as a norm—a normatively attractive outcome. For structural policy, the market as a territorial and social space helped to organize integration. Finally, Jabko argues that the market's representation as a talisman justified the discipline required by the market-friendly concentration of powers at the EU level.
The organization of the book is unusual. Preceding Jabko's four efficiently constructed case studies are an introduction and three framing chapters that engage theory and the scholarly literature. The three framing chapters offer a careful elaboration of just how his ideas fit within existing debates. Perhaps because those debates embody hundreds of books and thousands of articles, Jabko felt obliged to clarify just which pieces of the conventional wisdom were consistent with his account. Chapter 2 fully describes his puzzles. Chapter 3 deals with the variety of meanings proposed for—and ultimately attached to—the “market.” And Chapter 4 highlights the surprising influence of the Commission. Certainly they are thorough and well written. Some non-Europeanists, however, may be justifiably eager to get to the empirical narratives.
The analytical framework that informs Jabko's arguments is also extraordinarily astute. Indeed, Playing the Market ultimately succeeds in achieving far-reaching theoretical ambitions. Seeking to distinguish his own blend of rationalism and constructivism, the author emphasizes his departures from what he calls the utilitarian, institutionalist, and constructivist works that have come to define the terms of scholarly debate in EU studies. While some of his criticisms will feel familiar to Europeanists, one contribution is particularly novel and insightful, as well as potentially influential across the discipline. Jabko's skeptical engagement with constructivism leads him to argue in favor of what he describes as “strategic constructivism,” a theoretical orientation toward the purposeful creation of influential social facts by political leaders. The empirical narratives are thus informed by a mixture of political strategies and ideational influences. The result is a wonderful story.
Only a handful of criticisms are worth making. Although Jabko has, correctly it seems, criticized some of the passive-voice constructivism that is influential in EU studies, his distinguishing of a kind of active-voice constructivism is still clearly constructivist. In other words, while much of that constructivist scholarship may take for granted the very taken-for-grantedness of the social facts of European integration, the shortcoming is one of practice, not theory. There is nothing about constructivism as an approach to political economy that requires scholars' relative inattention to power or purposeful action. When the stakes are high, as they are with social facts, we should expect the kind of strategic, goal-oriented action of the European Commission in Jabko's book. I therefore read his criticisms of existing constructivist scholarship differently: Those criticisms should lead to a fundamental reinvigoration of the promise of a constructivist political economy that leaves out neither power nor politics.
Finally, Jabko's readers will likely enjoy a wonderful irony that is highlighted by the chapters on financial liberalization and monetary union. In both stories are the elements of the EU's “essential dual reality”—marketization and federalization—narrated as the means and ends of integration. That is, liberalization for the purposes of European organization, marketization for greater federalization. Many of today's European leaders and mass publics lament the marketization that “globalization” has putatively imposed on them. Jabko's insightful argument turns these lamentations on their head, for it is clear that if EU members find themselves hemmed in by liberal rules and practices, they should also recognize that the liberalism is of their own making. The fact that the strategic, not principled, liberalism of the project now undermines public support for further integration is one of the most fascinating paradoxes that Jabko cleverly resolves.
