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Beyond today’s increasingly central lexicon of geopolitics or geo-economics, you mobilize the lexicon of regulation. To analyze the tremors of our time – trade fragmentation, Sino-American rivalry, the return of conventional warfare – you speak of “international insertion.” How should we understand that expression?
Geopolitics in the strict sense consists in analyzing the policy pursued by states — or by other actors — at the local or international scale, through the lens of geography, access to natural resources, and transnational networks, especially transport.
Regulation theory (as a school of economic thought) concerns, for its part, how social and political conflicts can lead to new socio-economic regimes, more or less viable. A coherent economic regulation rests on an articulation between five pillars: the monetary and financial regime, the regime of competition, the wage relation, the state’s relationship to the economy, and, finally, international insertion, which I define as the set of rules organizing relations between a national space of accumulation and the international regime (trade, direct investment, exchange and finance, migrations). It is a double-edged form because it results from internal compromises, but also from the domestic translation of an external balance of power.
To understand this point, let us take a concrete example: the transformation of the current regime in the United States. How should we interpret it under this “international insertion”?
The vocabulary of regulation precisely links the mutation in American geopolitical discourse to the transformations of its economy.
After World War II, the United States fully assumed the role left by the United Kingdom by positioning itself as the undisputed world’s policeman against its Soviet rival. After Europe’s exhaustion between the wars, the turning point was mainly in setting the rules of the economic and financial game at the international level, notably at Bretton Woods, and thus the shift was enacted. The rest of the world had to bow to the dollar’s new centrality. The diffusion, if not the imposition, by the United States of its political conceptions of the world was largely expressed through its reorganization of the world economy.
What about today?
Europe, but also certain Asian countries, such as Japan and, later, South Korea, gradually strengthened their economies in the postwar decades, until they established themselves as competitors to the United States. But it is especially the rapid emergence of China over the last two decades that more deeply challenged this hierarchy. The international insertion that had accompanied American power thus becomes, in the eyes of its leaders, a source of vulnerability. This results in a profound aggiornamento of American geopolitics, accompanied by a renewal of regulation: retreat from free trade, assertion of the primacy of American interests, and mobilization of the state to open markets to large tech companies.
The diffusion, if not the imposition, by the United States of its political conceptions of the world was largely expressed through its reorganization of the world economy.
Robert Boyer
By contrast, after China joined the WTO in 2001, the Chinese governments under Jiang Zemin (1993-2003), Hu Jintao (2003-2013) and Xi Jinping (since 2013) built their domestic development model on a broad opening to international markets, allowing them to compensate for structural imbalances linked to the vigor of investment and production, to the detriment of consumption. In the recent period, it is rather China, and not the United States, that defends an open world economy, governed by clear and stable rules.
From an ideological perspective, this state of affairs may seem paradoxical: China, whose regime presents itself as communist, fully embraces economic liberalism, while the American state becomes increasingly interventionist and protective.
We must stop viewing these two economic models as opposites. Their modes of development are largely complementary. This economic interdependence, mutually advantageous, was recognized by Democratic administrations, but it was completely underestimated by Donald Trump, who did not realize the importance of trade with China in preserving the American Way of Life.
What regulatory-regulationist theoretical contributions help to better understand this complementarity between China and the United States?
The collapse of the Soviet Union has been misinterpreted as the end of history. Everywhere, markets and democracy were going to replace Gosplan and the Communist Party. This is what the new classical macroeconomics propagated, and it resulted in a remarkable misunderstanding of the transformations at work, due to a lack of fine distinction among the trajectories of different nations. The idea of convergence toward a single form of capitalism is a myth. The accumulation regime driven by innovation and the financial globalization of the United States has not spread universally across the world.
In recent times, it is rather China, not the United States, that defends an open world economy, governed by clear and stable rules.
Robert Boyer
A surprising complementarity emerged with the competition regime shaped by China. It is under the influence of the transnationalization of economic flows that political oppositions appeared: as the political and ideological gulf between the two powers widened, their economic regimes grew more and more interdependent. Protectionism, nationalism, and xenophobia are the symptoms of a return of the political against the supposed economic determinism, which one might have said would convert all countries to a single dominant and consensual economic model.
How to characterize Russia according to regulation theory?
Compared with the United States and China, Russia defines a third configuration of the relations between domestic development and geopolitical dynamics. Economically, the country has based its growth on mass exports of natural resources, with energy at the top of the list. The link to territory is thus evident since it is from exploiting its resources that political leaders seek to improve the population’s standard of living. This form of international insertion thus gives territorial control a particular economic importance, which can make conquest, and by extension war, a tool of international policy.
However, this logic does not by itself explain war. It combines with an imperial vision carried by successive Russian governments, including during the Soviet era. The aggression against Ukraine, difficult to understand for many American and European experts, finds then an explanation that combines geopolitics and the regulation approach. The regulation approach thus situates geopolitical strategies in time and space, relating them to the constraints and opportunities inherent in each country’s mode of development.
Does Europe’s international insertion have a chance to survive, at a time when the United States and China are entirely absorbed by their own confrontation?
Facing this titan duel, the European Union has proven to be disarmed. From the outset, European construction was built on the assumption that economic coordination among nation-states was the best defense against the return of wars that had spurred Europe’s decline. Over the decades, efforts were focused on building a broader market, then a single currency. These instruments were primarily designed to deepen European integration, far more than to project the Union’s power outward: for instance, making the euro a reserve currency capable of competing with the dollar remained a secondary objective for a long time.
The idea of converging toward the same form of capitalism is a myth.
Robert Boyer
Yet this construction leaves the Union particularly exposed to upheavals in its international environment. And several of the pillars on which it relied are today simultaneously weakened.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed Europe’s defense shortcomings. Facing a country that has made its military apparatus the linchpin of its geopolitical strategy, the Union was unprepared. The second term of Donald Trump reveals another structural fragility: Europe can no longer rely on the support of its American ally. Its dependence on the American pillar of NATO, for nuclear deterrence as well as for part of its military procurement, thus complicates any claim to strategic autonomy.
Economically, the order that accompanied European construction is transforming as well. The continent is caught between the pressure from Chinese exports and American protectionism. The energy dependencies of member states on external suppliers further complicate the formulation of a common position when available alternatives differ greatly from one country to another in terms of cost and access.
Thus, the very conditions that had made possible this particular form of European “non-power” are weakening. In addition to its persistent dependence on the United States for security and external energy reliance, there is the weakening of multilateralism as a mode of international governance, the structural handicaps of the European financial system, and the lag of its technological industries compared to their American and Chinese rivals. In an international order where law tends to fade before power relations, the Union risks gradually being relegated to a spectator role in 21st-century international relations.
Is this “non-power” also due to the very method of European construction? The Union has long transformed political conflicts into legal, regulatory, or technical problems. This method has yielded considerable successes, but it seems insufficient or ineffective in the face of imperial tendencies, AI, defense, and the fragmentation of global trade. Can the instruments that allowed Europe to be built now prevent it from becoming a power?
Indeed, in the gradual elimination of intra-European trade barriers, it is the regulations, under the founding treaty, that have played a decisive role. A jurisprudence has emerged from conflicts between member states, and it has ended up altering the conditions of competition between firms and the formation of prices in favor of consumers. The launch and subsequent adoption of the euro could have been an opportunity to move into the political realm, but its advocates presented it as a simple technical exercise of establishment and then credibility-building, grounded in criteria such as the ratio of public deficits to GDP and the debt-to-GDP ratio. It must be admitted that despite this structural weakness, the euro has asserted itself as the indisputable currency of member countries, something even the most critical acknowledge today.
The Europe is caught between the pressure of Chinese exports and American protectionism.
Robert Boyer
In contrast, the European budget represents a tiny fraction of the Union’s GDP (1-2% of gross national income) and it must be balanced, which greatly limits intervention capacity in stabilizing the business cycle and supporting investments for the future. This handicaps Europe in financing a plan worthy of the ambitions expressed by the United States and China. Similarly, the European method of coordinating national strategies reveals its limits in defense when faced with the goal of building a weapons industry capable of matching the threat Russia poses to the old continent and the erosion of trust in the United States’ commitment to NATO.
This dysfunction of European tools explains why law and regulation have replaced taxation and spending to the point of reinforcing the diagnosis that excessive regulation — sometimes called regulation (note: a neologism distinct from the Regulation School) — has reduced competitiveness and compromised the building of a green economy. By contrast with the United States, under Biden, massive subsidies and credits fostered the emergence of a new productive model combining digitization with environmental respect (Inflation Reduction Act), which Donald Trump quickly sought to dismantle. The imposition by the American president of high and fanciful tariffs underscored another major weakness of Europe: the President of the Commission does not wield the same political weight as the American and Chinese presidents. A properly formed European government would have had many instruments to counter Donald Trump’s threats. Yet they were not used. This same political weakness of Brussels is evident in trade negotiations with Mercosur: it was difficult to overcome conflicts of interest among member states, notably France and Germany, and more broadly North–South Europe.
In light of this analysis, it isn’t an exaggeration to propose the hypothesis that Europe’s technological, economic, and military weakness stems from the delay, if not the refusal, to build a genuine European political arena, a sine qua non for a Europe that could be a power and respond to the ambitions of predators who have become not only Vladimir Putin but also Donald Trump.
But if, as you just suggested, European weakness primarily stems from the absence of a true common political arena, doesn’t the Draghi report risk treating as an economic problem what is actually a deeper political contradiction? The Union has a market, rules, and a currency, but still no firms, capital, or truly transnational productive compromises. Can there be an European industrial strategy without a genuine European capitalism?
First, it should be noted that the Draghi report is welcome, as it draws a rigorous and candid assessment of the forces and especially the weaknesses of the old continent’s competitiveness. By stating that the European Union faced an existential risk, it awakened policymakers and proposed a strategy developed and detailed by domain. In my view, it, however, suffers from major flaws.
First, this diagnosis is rather late, since Europe’s divergence from emerging productive models dates back to the early 1990s. Over the decades, warnings and signals of decline and cumulative lag have multiplied.
The rise of Japan in the automotive and electronics sectors already revealed the weaknesses of European firms, which remained confident in the efficiency of the mass production model. In 2000, when Internet breakthroughs originated in the United States, a few European firms were at the forefront, but they could not withstand the consolidation of the digital sector which gave rise to American multinationals conquering global markets. The great financial crisis of 2008, though born in the United States, paradoxically widened the gap between macroeconomic trajectories across the Atlantic and translated into a relative impoverishment of Europe.
The weakness in Europe’s technology, economy, and military stems from delayed or refused construction of a genuine European political arena.
Robert Boyer
The European Union then declared its ambition to be the world’s leading hub of the economy, pursuing a development model sustainable from an environmental standpoint. But this ambition runs into the weaknesses of its productive apparatus: particularly visible in photovoltaics, where European producers can no longer withstand Chinese competition; the pressure also extends to batteries and, to a lesser extent, to wind power. The system’s failure to meet the EU’s strategic objective peaks when China’s overcapacity in electric vehicle production becomes a threat, including to Europe’s most powerful automotive industry, Germany. This lack of anticipation is precisely one of the problems highlighted by the Draghi report.
The second critique is more fundamental. Mario Draghi still subscribes to a neo-functional approach whereby common economic interests should automatically translate into a common policy.
As the pages proceed, one finds a succession of phrases such as: “Act as a community”; “Join forces for defense”; “A framework for coordinating competitiveness”; “Endow the Union with a foreign economic policy.” Yet, the book “The European Union: Innovate or Perish” shows that each government interprets the same objective according to the interests associated with each form of national capitalism. Whether development hinges on exports in Germany, consumption in France, or foreign direct investment in Hungary, the common European interest will be interpreted differently. Thus, any strategy defined by the Commission must pass through the filter of intergovernmental negotiations in the European Council, at the risk of losing part of its substance.
The implementation of Mario Draghi’s proposed measures therefore requires forming a political coalition that is far from assured, at a moment when nationalist-populist movements and parties blame Brussels for their domestic difficulties.
Thus, the fact that policy is conducted largely at the national level, rather than at the European level, seems to have prevented the emergence of a European capitalism. Airbus is a telling example: its success depended very little on Brussels-driven initiatives. Competition policy, from this perspective, protected consumers but sometimes hindered Europe’s emergence as an industrial power. Multinationals from each country formed alliances outside Europe, attracted by new markets in Asia and higher profitability than in the United States.
The implementation of Mario Draghi’s proposed measures thus requires forming a political coalition that is far from assured.
Robert Boyer
In these conditions, simply deepening the European market does not necessarily ensure the emergence of European economic actors that Draghi’s strategy implicitly requires. Therefore, it is not certain that some of the key proposals in the Draghi report are up to the challenges. Neither removing non-tariff barriers that still hinder the single market, nor deepening banking and financial integration guarantees a rebound in competitiveness on their own. The first measure could, on the contrary, attract new competitors to the point of threatening the survival of European firms, as illustrated by the transformation of the electric vehicle market under Chinese pressure. The second could, paradoxically, accelerate the relocation of European savings to the United States, where returns are higher: this trend is already well underway. In other words, financial integration does not by itself create European capitalism: in the absence of sufficiently attractive investment opportunities on the continent, it can even facilitate the flow of savings toward the capitalism that is already the most dynamic.
In short, the success of the Draghi plan could resolve some weaknesses while worsening others. This is the entire difficulty of the trade-offs facing the European Union in the era of globalized financial capital.
In a recent piece, Paul Krugman challenges the European decline narrative: European productivity remains close to that of the United States, the GDP lag largely reflects societal choices, and European weakness would be primarily political: a great continent but a power prisoner of its own doubts. In The European Union: Innovate or Perish, you describe three possible bifurcations: original federalism, pragmatic polycentric governance, or fragmentation under nationalist retrenchments. Between your own diagnosis — absence of European capitalism, structural dependencies, technological lag — and Krugman’s relative optimism, how would you assess the reality of Europe’s lag and which of these scenarios seems most probable today?
This challenge to economic orthodoxy by Paul Krugman is salutary but not the most convincing.
Statistically, the difference with Mario Draghi hinges on a different accounting convention for GDP per head (GDP at PPP). Indeed, if we proceed using current purchasing power parity rather than 2020 prices, the indicator shows near stagnation rather than a cumulative deterioration of the European Union relative to the United States. Economically, this means that the growth gap in favor of the United States owes to the dynamism of the tech sector. If we assume that the latter distributes its productivity gains worldwide through the fall in relative prices, Europe’s lag relative to the United States has not worsened, but the gap in GDP per capita at current PPP remains around 30%. The United States benefits from the profits of the most dynamic sectors, while the old continent benefits only from falling production prices. To quote an illuminating line: “Europe buys the future, the United States builds it.” This is simply a repetition of what had already occurred with information and communication technologies and the new economy in the 2000s.
Neither removing non-tariff barriers that still hinder the single market, nor deepening banking and financial integration guarantees a rebound in competitiveness.
Robert Boyer
Thus, the European Union is indeed in a position of inferiority because weak productivity gains no longer allow easy financing of broad social protection, and wage growth is now driven only by public transfers funded by debt.
The situation is not sustainable in the long run because the European lifestyle is no longer guaranteed. This shows up in public opinion with the most vulnerable segments of the population who feel they are slipping toward pauperization. It is on this ground that populist parties and governments thrive, attributing Europe’s failure to the rise of uncontrolled immigration. It is remarkable that this phenomenon affects all member countries regardless of their type of capitalism. It is a great danger for European construction, which could manifest itself in the next national elections. Therefore, one must fear a critical moment marked by nationalist retrenchments.
If we want to avert their triumph, we must show that they offer remedies worse than the ill and that defending full national sovereignty undermines each government’s bargaining power in an era of great predatory players who aim to reconstitute empires. More importantly, we must show how defending Europe’s common goods — democracy, security, climate adaptation, financial stability, and, ultimately, a European system of innovation — constitutes as many advantages for preserving citizens’ well-being.
This diagnosis partly aligns with Mario Draghi’s, who seems to endorse a major doctrinal rupture: the European market alone is no longer enough to produce the innovation, economic security, and geopolitical power the Union needs. In his Aix-la-Chapelle speech, he calls to “transform the crisis into union again.” Yet Europe’s responses to recent shocks — pandemic, energy, defense, critical technologies — often rely on ad hoc mechanisms, pragmatic coalitions, and differentiated integration, leaning more toward muddling through than toward a true federal uptick. Can this “pragmatic federalism” become a durable form of European governance, or is the Union still trapped by a fundamental contradiction between economic integration and political fragmentation? Can a geopolitical-economic power emerge without crossing the threshold of a fiscal union?
The claim that placing trust in the market to spur innovation has failed and that the rejection of a Europe with clout has become a major handicap for geopolitics is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an aggiornamento of European integration. Sovereigntists will conclude that one must return to the nation; federalists will argue, on the contrary, for a Hamiltonian moment comparable to what the United States experienced in the 18th century. Within these two groups, belonging to one form or another of capitalism determines different responses. In fact, the slogan “transform the crisis into union again” signals a nostalgia for the neo-functionalism method, which has definitively reached its limits. The euro’s success gave the illusion that a technical currency without state power was possible and viable in the long term. Conversely, diplomacy and defense cannot do without political agreements arising from the confrontation of member states’ viewpoints.
The situation is not sustainable in the long term because the European lifestyle is no longer guaranteed.
Robert Boyer
Hence, the notion of “pragmatic federalism” proves to be an oxymoron: a political regime is either federal or not, and there is no hybrid model. Mario Draghi likely intends to use the method of reinforced cooperation, as provided for by European treaties. This is for instance what we observe with the formation of a coalition of the willing in foreign policy to oppose Trump and defend Ukraine. It has the advantage of establishing a global power balance, but it comes with the drawback of fragmenting European solidarity. Optimists will argue that the Union already has such forms of differentiated integration with the eurozone or the Schengen area.
The decision-makers thus hit a fundamental contradiction between economic integration and political fragmentation. How to move forward? As seen, simply deepening banking and financial integration — capital markets union and banking union — will probably not be enough: it rests first on technical expertise, where political mobilization is needed. A far more promising route would be a fiscal union, because it would involve seeking a founding compromise at the European level. That compromise would signal a renewed democratic control by citizens and would ensure effectiveness in implementing the priorities agreed at the community level.
That would require this Hamiltonian founding act, making the political not an obstacle to competitiveness but its accelerator. A genuine European budget would thus have a double function: it would be a constitutive element of a political order and could act as lender of last resort. This political horizon is desired by some of Europe’s leaders, but remains taboo and proves difficult to implement in a period when governments at the national level struggle to reduce their deficits and look for new tax bases.
In your recent writings on the United States, you describe an American capitalism torn by a deep contradiction between financial dominance, technological futurism, and nationalist populism. Should Trumpism be understood as the enduring expression of a transformation of the American regime of accumulation?
Trumpism is first and foremost the expression of American society’s crisis under the double impact of unprecedented financialization and an ongoing openness to the world that over decades has generated unparalleled social and political polarization. A populist discourse allows Donald Trump to win the presidency twice. In his second term, he frees himself from law and the Constitution to decide on a surreal tariff hike in response to his MAGA base.
Immediately, in April 2025, financial markets sanction the plan’s amateurism, continually revised, and legal actions culminate in the Supreme Court’s ruling the across-the-board tariff increases illegal. The negative impact expected was offset, or even hidden, by the extreme dynamism of investment linked to artificial intelligence.
This is where a major gap appears in managing the populist project. It is hardly surprising that an administration comprised of billionaires defends the powerful more than the weak.
Donald Trump no longer limits himself to defending the interests of oil magnates, for he becomes a crucial supporter of crypto-assets, which he had previously criticized during his first term. He can no longer remain insensitive to the power of tech capital. Beyond the ups and downs of the personal relationship between Donald Trump and Elon Musk, there seems to be a de facto alliance between financiers and Silicon Valley. A corresponding shift occurs in foreign policy: the same president who sought to halt a succession of costly wars declares war on Iran. Meant to be a mere excursion, it ends in a fiasco that confirms the fragility of the cease-fire announced on June 14, 2026 and signed at the Palace of Versailles on June 17. The blocking of the Hormuz Strait was enough to undo the promise of reducing the cost of living for American citizens, foreshadowing turbulent midterm elections.
Will Donald Trump go down in history as the catalyst of accumulation dominated by the deployment of artificial intelligence with the backing of enthusiastic financiers from the FAB 10? Time will tell, but already we must point to the risk of a speculative bubble that jeopardizes the hypothesis of an orderly transition toward this new regime, fundamentally unbalanced and unequal. Indeed, the implicit returns embedded in current stock prices are exceptionally high. They are likely to be disappointed if the AI breakthrough is not followed by a diffusion of innovations and applications capable of transforming the productive organization in a lasting way: it is this diffusion that will determine whether a genuine regime of accumulation emerges rather than a speculative bubble. In any case, Donald Trump’s rise to power marks the end of an era in American history without clearly delineated lines of a new one.
China’s economy seems to have succeeded where Western democracies still struggle: coordinating strategic planning, technological ascent, industrial might, and financial control. Is China merely an authoritarian variant of capitalism — or a new historical form capable of permanently redefining the relations between state, market, and sovereignty?
It is a broad question that goes far beyond the scope of this interview. One must first acknowledge the idiosyncratic character of China’s trajectory, which is part of a centuries-long experience of controlling the people by an elite meticulously selected for its capacity to govern. The Chinese Communist Party fits into this lineage, and its role is essential to understanding how it became possible to reconcile strategic planning with the unleashing of competition among local corporatisms. This is how China succeeded in achieving a synergy between the consolidation of power and dynamic economic growth in an original form of capitalism that is by no means a variant of the Soviet project.
The arrival of Donald Trump marks the end of an era in American history without the lines of a new one clearly emerging.
Robert Boyer
Furthermore, population size matters because it enables division of labor within China’s own territory, without global value chains disturbing coherence, except marginally and temporarily. Few countries are capable of producing this form of capitalism, not least because China makes industrialization particularly difficult elsewhere. Could a Communist Party follow the Chinese path, for example in Latin America? The Cuban experience suggests doubt.
Other reasons prevent labeling contemporary China as the emblematic figure of a new form of capitalism poised to define an era.
Indeed, the primacy of global competition makes the wage relation the adjustment variable for an unbalanced accumulation regime, constantly reproducing an excess of production capacity relative to domestic demand. China exerts extreme competitive pressure on the weaker economies, and the persistence of a large external trade surplus fuels protectionist measures elsewhere, especially in the United States. It is thus unlikely that, in the future, world capitalism will be made up of countries trying to imitate Chinese capitalism. This form could thrive only through its complementarity with the American-finance-led accumulation regime. Finally, the non-recognition of meaningful rights for workers, including the right to unionize, poses problems for adopting this model in democracies that uphold human rights.
Conceptually, the breakthrough of Chinese capitalism undermines liberal orthodoxy’s instinctive claim that any form of industrial planning is doomed to failure and that the state is inherently unable to promote development. In practice, however, it is not by copying it that other countries will withstand China’s competitive pressure.
You noted that ecological transition as well as rearmament can have regressive effects on private consumption and reopen, as in France, social conflicts of the Gilets jaunes type. Can Europe articulate a war economy, climate transition, and social compromise, or will these new priorities become incompatible with preserving the welfare state?
After the 2015 Paris climate conference, Keynesian-inspired economists proposed a relatively optimistic scenario: thanks to the magnitude of multipliers, investments devoted to mitigating climate change or adapting to it could be compatible with continued growth in consumption. In light of experience, for most economies, multipliers are weaker the more open they are. In France, the Gilets Jaunes movement showed that ecological taxation conflicted with maintaining living standards for the most modest citizens.
Moreover, history shows that periods of rearmament exert pressure on consumption, and this lesson is likely to apply to European Union countries which, in response to Donald Trump’s demands at the NATO summit in The Hague in 2025, should raise their defense effort from 2% to 5% of GDP by 2035 (3.5% for baseline military expenditure and 1.5% for infrastructure and resilience, including cyber).
If warfare replaces welfare as the priority, isn’t political power at risk of losing the trust of citizens for whom the security of their personal and professional path is part of the founding bargain of most EU member states? Not to mention that finding a new balance between generations is necessary given the speed of aging. These are choices the market cannot settle. They require, instead, a common diagnosis, deliberation on alternatives, negotiation of a medium-to-long-term action plan, and finally political capacity to implement it on a daily basis.
It is time to invent a new form of planning, including a policy of incomes. Planning is not merely an analytical and technocratic exercise but a confrontation of what is desirable and what is possible, in various local and national arenas, of civil society as well as the State.
You said you know of no solid theoretical defense of European capitalism grounded in social compromise, whether social-democratic, Christian-democratic, Rhineland, ordoliberal, or Scandinavian. Is the European Union today suffering less from a coordination deficit than from a deficit of thought or strategy of its own?
That is mostly the case among economists. Despite rare exceptions, they tend to think that European countries are imperfect copies, either of the ideal of a purely competitive market economy or of the American economy. To take just one example, macroeconomics textbooks are essentially copies of those in the United States, while the cross-relations between monetary policy, taxation, public spending, and the regime of competition reflect a very different distribution of power. Similarly, the United States’ economic debates are transmitted to Europe as is, while often the problems and stakes are specific to the old continent.
It is time to invent a new planning, including a policy of incomes.
Robert Boyer
Socio-economists offer, in my view, a more relevant analysis.
First, instead of using a hypothetico-deductive method, they undertake systematic international comparisons that reveal the multiplicity of institutional architectures that frame economic activity. They derive from distinct political regimes, which dispels the illusion of a pure economic theory able to explain the contemporary world.
Second and especially, social expenditures on health, education, training, and other areas are not only understood as modalities of redistributing wealth created by private activity, but as contributing decisively to wealth creation through what one can call, for convenience, a form of social capital. Mobilizing this international research current organized by the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) would be very useful for Europeans to defend the logic of their diverse variants of capitalism that include a broad universalist social protection system.
You have often lamented the disappearance of economists capable of holding together theory, history, institutions, and public action. At a time when Europe seeks simultaneously to think its economic security, ecological transition, industrial policy, and technological sovereignty, does the discipline’s growing specialization explain contemporary incapacity to think major historical bifurcations? And what would be needed to reconstruct a true European political economy?
Why have more and more economists, better trained, with abundant data, refined econometric techniques, and remarkable capacities for formalization, become so irrelevant for analyzing contemporary issues?
I see several reasons: an extreme division of labor, insulation in increasingly specialized scholarly communities, excessive confidence in microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics, the primacy of techniques over conceptual thinking, and, finally, an empirical turn to the detriment of theory. This was the theme of the book “Can a Discipline Without Reflexivity Be a Science?”
Thus, extremely few economists anticipated the great American financial crisis of 2008, while one can easily imagine that taxi drivers in major American cities perfectly perceived the spectacular housing bubble that was forming. One can then turn to John Maynard Keynes, who wrote in 1924 in his memory of Alfred Marshall:
“The good economist must unite in himself qualities rarely found in a single man, among which a good knowledge of both history and philosophy, sound intuition, statesmanship, and the ability to construct models… He must study the present in the light of the past for the needs of the future. No aspect of human nature or its institutions should escape his gaze.”
The professionalization of the craft has rendered this ideal almost unattainable. This anomie of the division of labor among economists contributes to the gravity of the intertwined crises of our time.
Contemporary geopolitical clashes pit political projects still bound up with interdependent economic, technological, financial, and environmental realities of unprecedented intensity.
Robert Boyer
Yet there is hope to be found in comparative and historical political economy programs in universities, where the disciplines that make a good economist are taught in equal measure. One should not hold out too much optimism. In 1989, Amitai Etzioni founded the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, whose aim was to bring together all disciplines that treat the economy as a human activity to forge an alternative paradigm to that of economists. This scholarly society is doing well, but it must fit into essentially monodisciplinary teaching structures, which has gradually eroded the ambition of the original project.
In conclusion, in the continuation of our interview, what do you consider to be the key contributions that political economy and regulation theory can offer to today’s geopolitical reflection?
The regulation approach was designed to account for the dynamics and diversity of forms of capitalism and their development paths. Over the last two decades, it has gradually drawn closer to geopolitical analyses. Three major lessons emerge.
First, geopolitics is not merely a clash of worldviews: it also expresses the opportunities and constraints inherent in a particular form of international insertion, itself characteristic of each developmental mode.
Second, there is no capitalism destined to impose itself universally, but a geography of development modes that are fundamentally different. The research program pursued since the 1970s by an international network of researchers offers a particularly clear illustration concerning the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union.
Finally, contemporary geopolitical confrontations pit political projects against each other while still being caught in interdependencies—economic, technological, financial, and environmental—of unprecedented intensity. The chaotic course of Donald Trump’s second presidency thus testifies to the scale of the imbalances and contradictions that run through a world economy threatened by fragmentation.