Abstract
This chapter engages critically with the EU’s new common industrial policy initiative and its broader framing within social democratic visions of Europe, and argues that with the particular direction that the new common EU industrial policy is taking, social democracy in the EU, once more, is failing to steer the EU towards a more radical social agenda and to capitalise politically on the ‘deep reforms’ that have recently been announced. The prevailing political project of competitiveness through internal devaluation exacerbates existing structural asymmetries and economic disintegration. As a result, assumptions about a rekindling of ‘social democratic Europe’ through an industrial policy flanked by the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR ) initiative remain fundamentally flawed.
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Wigger, A., Horn, L. (2019). The Bed You Made: Social Democracy and Industrial Policy in the EU. In: Hay, C., Bailey, D. (eds) Diverging Capitalisms. Building a Sustainable Political Economy: SPERI Research & Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03415-3_8
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