PhD thesis defence by Jordy Weyns
The EU’s ‘geoeconomic turn’ is often taken for a return of the state – perhaps even further EU integration – in reaction to external challenges, and for a shift away from policymaking dominated by economic interest groups and geared towards international markets. Export finance, which represents a major share of current interventions and features recurringly in the EU’s geoeconomic agenda, is a type of interventionism which is in three meaningful ways at odds with such conceptions of the geoeconomic turn. First, it deepens engagement with global markets and works in tandem with multinationals’ economic interests; second, it is implemented primarily through financial intermediaries rather than being under strong direction by state executives; and third, despite being integral to European agendas, neither is it being leveraged into further integration, nor is its uneven proliferation across member states kept in check by the Commission. Salient aspects of geoeconomic interventionism present clear continuities with pre-existing policymaking logics, rather than strong ruptures. The dissertation investigates the political economy and governance of European export finance, to shed light on the geoeconomic turn more broadly by accounting for the continuities that shape it. In juxtaposition with dominant approaches that struggle account for these continuities, the thesis develops a historical institutionalist approach which informs three articles. Based on industrial policy data, elite interviews, policy documents, and secondary sources, the articles establish and explain continuities in geoeconomic interventionism with respective regards to (a) the relation of trade and industrial policy to multinational firms and international markets, (b) states’ capacity to exercise control and direct market processes, and (c) European integration. The articles explain how previous institutional constellations and governance shape geoeconomic interventionism by (a) empowering and shaping the preferences of multinational firms, (b) weakening state capacities for industrial intervention, and (c) making European interventionism reliant on national capacities.
Jordy Weyns is a PhD candidate at the EUI. His main research interests include (international) political economy, state interventionism, and European integration. In his thesis, he studies the drivers, implementation, and effects on European integration of geoeconomic interventionism in the EU, in particular export finance.