Dr Or Raviv

Like many other developing countries in the past decade, Central European countries pursued financial market reforms based on the assumption that foreign finance would boost the depth and liquidity of their national financial systems, promote efficient economic management and enhance financial stability. Unlike other developing countries however, Central European countries expected to be shielded from the worst effects of global neoliberalism through the process of EU accession. This article evaluates the financial integration of Central Europe in the context of the global process of finance-led restructuring. The article concludes that the financial integration of Central Europe has failed to generate the promised optimisation of investment, let alone reduce macroeconomic risks. This is because the actual Eastward expansion strategies of Western European credit institutions were never geared towards addressing the developmental needs of the host Central European economies. Rather, they were always aimed at redressing the declining profitability of financial institutions operating in the already financialised economies of Western Europe. As a result, foreign financiers emerged as a powerful rentier class in Central Europe able to extract rent incomes far in excess of their profits in the west. The dominancy of foreign financiers in the region resulted in a reorientation of state policy, corporate strategy and households' behaviour, in line with the imperatives of financially based accumulation strategies. This lead not only to an unprecedented transfer of property rights from local society to foreign investors, but also to increased indebtedness and risk, which are ultimately unsustainable in the long run.

European integration is interpreted in this paper as the route by which (West) Germany, profiting from close ties with the English-speaking West, was able to restore its full sovereignty and economic pre-eminence in Europe. Yet in shaping the actual integration process, it was France which played the key role. Most of the landmark steps towards the current EU were French proposals to pre-empt Anglophone-German collusion; creating European structures in which a resurgence of Germany (politically and economically) was made subject to permanent negotiation. German unification in 1991 removed the one reason why successive governments of the Federal Republic had gone along with this. Paradoxically, sovereign Germany today finds itself bound by the dense networks of consultation and decision-making which make the EU unique in the field of regional integration. The paper shows that between 1992 and 2005, German capital has moved to the centre of the network of corporate interlocks in the North Atlantic area. This helps to explain why in the post-1991, post-Soviet era of neoliberal, finance-driven globalisation, Germany is increasingly 'speaking for Europe', as its corporations have become nodal points in the communication structures through which the responses to the challenges facing the EU and the West at large are being shaped. © 2011 Taylor & Francis.

© 2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Much of the existing literature on the current financialized era of capitalism is guilty of essentializing the US experience. The methodological implication of this conceptual starting point has been that financialization in Europe was, and still is, generally assessed in comparative terms against the yardstick of US developments. This limitation obscures from view the unique trajectory of European finance-led innovation, and consequently, the extent to which European economies have become vulnerable to financial instability and crisis. To remedy this, the present article investigates the micro-foundations of European financialization in the lead-up to the 2007–2008 global financial crisis to uncover the reasons for the surprising severity and persistence of financial instability in Europe. The article argues that while the institutions, actors and practices underpinning European financialization may differ markedly from those in the US, the former were nevertheless at once reconstituted by, and constitutive of, the continuous global process of finance-led restructuring. This work offers insights that go beyond the specificities of European financial capitalism. It facilitates a more nuanced approach to banking and macroprudential policy reform in Europe as well as encourages further research into the financialization of accumulation in other national and regional contexts.