The Political Economy of Europeanized Financial Regulation

Over the past two decades, the European Union (EU) has become a central actor in financial regulation and developed complex institutions to govern financial markets. Recent scholarship has detailed the functioning of these institutions and revealed their inner dynamics. At the same time, however, the political-economy embeddedness of financial regulation, which had inspired early research on European financial integration, has increasingly dropped out of the picture.
This essay makes the case for putting this embeddedness central once again and exploring how the Europeanization of financial regulation has affected the political-economy make-up of Europe. To do so, scholars need to study finance not only as a service sector, but also as that facet of the economy that creates and allocates credit and financial investments. Beyond the evolution of socio-economic orders inside Europe, a focus on such links provides novel avenues for making sense of the European role in global financial governance.