Abstract
This paper reconceptualises the understanding of the role of Cohesion Policy in the (spatio-temporal trans)formation of European Union (EU) as a market-making spatial order since the end of 1980s up to now. By doing so, it tries to deepen the neoinstitutionalist EU Studies scholarship which has so far facilitated a limited understanding of the Cohesion Policy by explaining its existence either as an impactless side-effect of inter-state bargaining or as an integral part the EU s institution-building into a multi-level polity without, however, considering the historically contingent social purpose of the policy in particular and the EU in general.
Constitutive to the new round of (neoliberal) globalization since the 1980s, such EU s social purpose has aimed at temporarily enabling structural coherence of otherwise socio-economically diverse, unequal, and actually contradictory space of European national capitalisms by reordering them into Europe s single and trans-national market-making regional order (Offe, 2003). Some would contextualize this human-made, but structural change into a transition from post-1945 embedded liberalism (Ruggie, 1982) to post-1980s embedded neoliberalism (Van Apeldoorn, 2002) in (Western) Europe.
However, taking the Cohesion Policy s social purpose (of embedded neoliberalism) seriously requires to go beyond the neoinstitutionalist limits of analysis to address the elephant in the room: (uneven) capitalist development. This paper accomplishes this task by introducing the concept of developmental fix which learns from the theorization of spatio-temporal fix (e.g.
Harvey, 2003; Jessop, 2006; Jessop and Sum, 2015). Given that the Cohesion Policy is set to regulate the socio-economic development on (sub)national peripheries, the developmental fix helps us to understand how the EU unevenly and unstably reconstitutes its structural coherence on its periperipheries [150 more words needed to continue....]