Josef Hien

This is a beautiful book: With a matt pink cover and a massive 347 pages, it gets the reading appetite going. The book consists of 12 chapters written by illustrious experts on neoliberalism that the editors Dieter Plewhe, Quinn Slobodian and Philip Mirowski have drummed up. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism is not the first collaboration of these giants of the study of neoliberalism. It is the sequel to The Road from Mont Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, which in 2009 set new standards for the study of neoliberalism. The book is still today, ten years after its publication, the go-to book on the diffusion of neoliberalism. Given all this, my expectations toward the new book were stellar. Luckily, I have not been disillusioned. Better than the book itself if only one thing: that you can download an ungated free version. Knowledge to the people! There is but one caveat and that comes from the main message of the book. If I had to summarize it in a single sentence, ...

Integration-through-crisis has affected EMU governance in myriad ways. This paper focuses on two trends, both of which have negative implications for democratic legitimacy in the EU and its member states. Firstly, the crisis has led to an increased reliance on non-majoritarian modes of policy-making, at the expense of democratically accountable institutions and processes. Secondly, the crisis has led to a new emphasis on coercive enforcement in EMU, at the expense of the voluntary cooperation that previously characterised (and sustained) the EU as a community of law. The ECB is implicated in both of these trends. In relation to the first, while the ECB was already unusually independent even by the standards of central banks this could be justified, prior to the crisis, by the specificity, technicality and low salience of its monetary policy mandate. However, the crisis has resulted in both the politicisation of the Bank’s mandate and its de facto expansion, in ways that render its i...

This chapter assesses the changing institutional, political, and social anchoring of faith-based organizations in Germany. It analyzes how the two largest organizations, Caritas and Diakonie, reply to the double-pressure of marketization and secularization. Caritas and Diakonie have traditionally played an important role in the German welfare state, enjoying many institutional and legal provisions. However, they currently face two major challenges: first, liberalization of the care market in the early 1990 has stripped them of many of their legal and financial advantages and exposed them to market-based competition. The integration of Eastern European countries into the labor market regime of the single European market has amplified this pressure. Second, the proselyting aims of Caritas and Diakonie face growing public and political resistance in Germany, where church membership is in steady decline since the 1970s. This double-pressure has led to a crisis of identity, which might t...

The thesis investigates the influence of political Catholicism and Catholic social doctrine on the evolution of the continental European welfare regimes. Paradoxically it finds that the doctrine had less influence on the formation of welfare regimes in countries where Catholicism was strong in contrast to countries where it was in a weak position. This finding does not only challenge many of the accounts that have perceived and analyzed religious influences on welfare state formation as a static and quantifiable variable but also addresses and rivals most postulations of mainstream welfare state theories such as Logic of Industrialism, Power Resource, Class Coalition and Employer Centered Approaches. In contrast to these accounts the thesis finds that welfare in continental Europe evolved during the 19 th century and most of the 20 th century as the result of a battle over ideas and worldviews between different societal groups and their political outlets. Which idea and worldview ma...

For centuries, churches were the main institutional providers of welfare in Europe before the state took over this role in the late 19th century. The influence of modernization theory meant that modern welfare state theorists increasingly regarded religion and its impact on welfare as a relic from the distant past. It was anticipated that modern, differentiated, and industrialized societies would see the decline and inevitable disappearance of religious welfare provision along with religiosity. Surprisingly, however, at the beginning of the 21st century in many modern industrialized societies, religious institutions are increasingly becoming involved in welfare provision again. The religion blind classic welfare state literature offers no explanation for this phenomenon. This present paper argues that the resurgence of faith-based welfare providers is the reversal of a phenomenon that occurred in the late 19th century when modern states started to strip religious providers of their ...

Whether the EU is a community of shared values is increasingly contested in public debates and academic discourses alike. We analyse the level and change in the acceptance of the EU’s officially promoted values in seven domains: personal freedom, individual autonomy, social solidarity, ethnic tolerance, civic honesty, gender equality and liberal democracy. We find that EU-member populations support the EU- values strongly and increasingly over time, especially in individual freedoms and gender equality. Regarding support for these values, EU-member populations are notably distinct from non-EU populations. Simultaneously, however, EU-member populations are internalizing the EU-values at different speeds—alongside traditional cultural fault lines that continue to differentiate Europe—in the following order from fastest to slowest internalization: (1) Protestant, (2) Catholic, (3) Ex-communist and lastly (4) Orthodox countries. In conclusion, the EU- population writ large evolves into ...

The immediate effects of the Euro crisis have been tamed but the crisis has soured the relations between Southern and Northern Member states for many years to come. Comparative political economy explains the frictions between North and South as a result of different institutional configurations of national economies (Varieties of Capitalism), different interests of capital and labor coalitions (growth model perspective) or ideational traditions (ordoliberal vs dirigisme). We argue that the exclusive focus of these approaches on either, rational institutionalism, interest coalitions or economic ideas obscures that these three factors come together in a long-term evolutionary trajectory that has formed national economic cultures within the Eurozone since the 1950s. We examplify our cultural political economy approach showing empircally how the German and Italian political economies developed in different ways since the end of WWII. In the second part of our contribution we develop a c...

The negative perception of Italians of their state has been formed by the deep conflict between Church and state that emerged during the Napoleonic occupation of Italy and reached its peak with Italian unification in the late nineteenth century. To the Vatican, territorial integration of the Italian nation state posed an existential threat, both at the political level (loss of territory) and at the spiritual level (diffusion of liberalism). From unification onwards the Vatican did all it could to harm the legitimacy of the Italian state. This chapter analyzes the Vatican strategy to delegitimize the Italian state and its right to tax. It shows how the willingness of Italians to pay their taxes still suffers today from the Church–state conflict.

This chapter assesses the changing institutional, political, and social anchoring of faith-based organizations in Germany. It analyzes how the two largest organizations, Caritas and Diakonie, reply to the double-pressure of marketization and secularization. Caritas and Diakonie have traditionally played an important role in the German welfare state, enjoying many institutional and legal provisions. However, they currently face two major challenges: first, liberalization of the care market in the early 1990 has stripped them of many of their legal and financial advantages and exposed them to market-based competition. The integration of Eastern European countries into the labor market regime of the single European market has amplified this pressure. Second, the proselyting aims of Caritas and Diakonie face growing public and political resistance in Germany, where church membership is in steady decline since the 1970s. This double-pressure has led to a crisis of identity, which might translate into a full-fledged existential crisis for faith-based employers in Germany. That is, either Caritas and Diakonie comply with cost containment and liberalization and become normal market-based care providers, or they try to maintain a distinct religious profile with higher caring standards and non-profit character, emphasizing their religious aims which will expose them to increasing secular critique.

Over one million people work for a faith-based welfare provider in Germany. Caritas and Diakonie, the largest faith-based providers in Germany enjoy prerogatives that do not exist in other countries. This particular group of faith-based organizations is exempt from federal labor law and discrimination clauses, which results in arbitrary, and in other cases, institutional, forms of discrimination against particular social groups in society. Research has focused on the institutional regulation of faith-based practice in Germany. Much less attention has been devoted to the faith component within faith-based welfare provision. This study traces the evolution of church doctrine and its impact on the care and employment practices of faith-based welfare providers in Germany from the 1950s to the present. It argues that the conservative ideology of these welfare providers amplifies the negative effects of gendered occupational regimes.

Ordoliberalism became during the years of the financial crisis the target of a European-wide critical campaign. This school of thought is widely perceived as the ideational source of Germany’s crisis politics which has even led to an “ordoliberalisation of Europe”. The essay questions the validity of such assessments. It focuses on two aspects which are widely neglected in current debates. One is the importance of law in the ordoliberal vision of the ordering of economy and society. The second is its cultural and religious background in particular in German Protestantism. The influence of the ordoliberal school on European law, so the essay argues, is overrated in all stages of the integration project. Anglo-American neoliberalism rather than German Ordoliberalism was in the ideational driver seat since the 1980s. In the responses to the financial crisis the ordoliberal commitment to the rule of law gave way to discretionary emergency measures. While the foundational synthesis of economic and legal concepts became indefensible, the cultural underpinnings of the ordoliberal tradition survived and developed a life of their own in particular in German political discourses.

There has been much talk about ordoliberalism recently. Scholars and the press identify it as the dominant economic instruction sheet for Germany's European crisis politics. However, by analyzing ordoliberalism only as an economic theory, the debate downplays that ordoliberalism is also an ethical theory, with strong roots in Protestant social thought. It is this rooting in Protestant social thought that makes Ordoliberalism incompatible with the socioeconomic ethics of most of the European crisis countries, whose ethics originate in Catholic and Orthodox social thought. This divergence is the source of a crisis of understanding between European nations and hinders a collective response to the Euro crisis.

Das aktuelle europäische Interesse an der ordoliberalen Tradition 1 Der Schatten des Ordoliberalismus liegt über Europa. Diese sozialphilosophische Theorietradition, vor der Euro-Krise nur einer Handvoll eingefleischter Kenner außerhalb der deutschsprachigen Welt bekannt, hat in den letzten sieben Jahren eine imposante Karriere hingelegt. Gewichtige Wortmeldungen in Presse 2 und Wissen-schaft 3 sehen im Ordoliberalismus eine wirtschaftspolitische Konzeption, an der sich die deutsche Regierung während der Schuldenkrise orientiert haben soll. Der Einfluss dieser Politik habe eine »Ordoliberalisierung Europas« bewirkt. Deutsche Beiträge, die in diese Klage einstimmen würden, sind vergleichsweise rar. 4 Dieser Befund ist der Ausgangspunkt unserer Überlegungen: Die Kritik am Ordoliberalis-mus ist vor allem Kritik an der deutschen Krisenpolitik. Dieses aktuelle Interesse am Ordoliberalismus fokussiert sich stark auf seine wirt-schaftspolitischen Vorstellungen. Dabei wird vergessen, wie sehr die Gründungs-väter auf Interdisziplinarität pochten und die Wirtschaftsordnung als Rechtsord-nung verstanden haben. Neben dieser Verankerung des Ordoliberalismus in rechtswissenschaftlichen Vorstellungen werden wir auf eine zweite, in der gegen-wärtigen Debatte ebenfalls marginalisierte Grundlage eingehen, nämlich das stark vom Protestantismus geprägte Wertefundament der ordoliberalen Theorie, das ihren soziologischen Kern ausmacht. Die direkte orientierende Wirkung des Ordoliberalismus auf die deutsche Euro-papolitik wird unseres Erachtens überschätzt. Der Einfluss dieser Schule auf die Ausformung des Integrationsprojekts war selbst in den formativen 1950er und 1960er Jahren gering. Ihre theoretische und ihre praktische Bedeutung sind seit den 1960er Jahren verblasst. Der Rückhalt in der Rechtswissenschaft wurde unter dem Eindruck der amerikanischen »ökonomischen Analyse des Rechts« immer schwächer. 5 Sukzessive haben auch Volkswirtschaftler, die der ordoliberalen Tra-1 Wir bedanken uns herzlich bei den anonymen Gutachtern und der Redaktion für kritische, herausfordernde und ermutigende Hinweise. Josef Hiens Teil des Artikels wurde im Rahmen des REScEU Projekts (Reconciling Social and Economic Europe) erstellt, ein vom Europäischem Forschungsrat gefördertes Projekt (Fördernummer 340534) unter der Leitung von Maurizio Ferrera an der Universität Mailand.