Governing Market Integration and Development—Lessons from Europe’s Eastern and Southern Peripheries: Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction offers a common analytical framework for the papers in the special issue that explore the economic and political crises of the EU from the perspective of the governance problems of market integration. These crises, we argue, can all be linked to the deficiencies in the management of the developmental consequences of market integration among economies at different levels of development. The deeper is economic integration and the more diverse are the starting endowments of participating actors, the less predictable are the developmental effects of integration, and the larger is the need for mechanisms that could help to anticipate and manage them in time. While economic integration offers new developmental opportunities for the less developed economies, the capacities of both national and supranational public actors to manage the developmental problems in Europe are inadequate. Weak EU capacities to get in sync the requirements of deepening economic integration and to manage its developmental consequences, we argue, can be attributed to the asymmetry of the European polity, where policymakers whose primary accountability lies at the national level govern the transnational market. Actors in charge of governing the common market have strong incentives to externalize the developmental consequences of integration, and they have limited room for making the common market a common good.