Varieties of neoliberalism: why did Europe build stronger single-market rules than America?

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• Department of Political and Social Sciences

Which polity has more of a "single market," the United States or the European Union, and why? Common wisdom suggests that Europe’s market represents an "incomplete" imitation of earlier American developments, but this view mischaracterises both polities. Europeans have removed many interstate regulatory barriers that Americans retain. EU single-market rules are unambiguously stronger and more systematic than those in the U.S. This re-description confounds leading theories of political economy, calling for a new explanation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the rising movement of neoliberalism connected to different political coalitions in each arena. European neoliberals struck deals with Europeanist institution-builders, while American neoliberals allied with champions of "states' rights." These coalitions generated institutional path dependence and ideational "knowledge regimes," editing continental European neoliberalism to prioritise central authority to eliminate interstate barriers, while American neoliberalism sought weaker federal authority and legitimated many of the same barriers.