Variegated neo-liberalism: transnationallyoriented fractions of capital in EU financialmarket integration

This article develops a twofold critique: on the one hand it addresses thoseaccounts commonly associated with the Varieties of Capitalism literature and theirassociated understanding of neo-liberalism to argue that there is a dominant tendency tocollapse into a binary analysis that asserts either we are witnessing convergence or we areexperiencing path dependency. On the other hand it addresses ‘neo-Gramscian’ accountswhich tend to overemphasise processes of transnational convergence and the emergence ofa transnational capitalist class at the expense of the embeddedness of capital in nationaldomesticcontexts. On this basis, it is argued that several contributions within politicalgeography pose meaningful questions about the premise that neo-liberalism is inherentlyvariegated. Principally, this involves developing the notion of variegated neo-liberalism toanalyse the dynamics of a contingent neo-liberal consensus between transnationally-orientedfractions that both drives EU reform in a neo-liberal direction and reinforces domesticlinkages organic to the national context. As a result, the article suggests we therefore rejectthe notion of a transnational capitalist class somehow detached from the national