Playing the Market

In the 1980s and 1990s, Nicolas Jabko suggests, the character of European integration altered radically, from slow growth to what he terms a "quiet revolution." In this book he traces the political strategy that underlay the move from the Single...

Nicolas Jabko is a Senior Research Fellow at Sciences Po, Paris.

Why did the European Union (EU) rapidly embark on the path to a single market with a common currency during the 1980s and 1990s? Playing the Market addresses this important and popular question in an exceptional way. It is an engaging book with a new approach that can be effectively applied to other areas of European integration such as political or security integration.

For those bent on solving the last remaining mysteries of European integration, Playing the Market is a must.

Playing the Market is an excellent book that deserves a wide audience of political scientists, economists, and policymakers. It is ambitious, insightful, novel, and persuasive and should stand the test of time.

Amy Verdun, University of Victoria:

Playing the Market offers a provocative and simple analysis of the European integration process. Nicolas Jabko systematically builds a strong argument based on four solid case studies.

Daniel Kelemen, University of Oxford:

Playing the Market is a fascinating and important book. In a nuanced yet forceful account, Nicolas Jabko demonstrates that the European Commission deployed a strategy that invoked multiple dimensions of the logic of 'the market' to promote its political objectives of deeper European integration and to accelerate the process beyond anyone's expectations. This is the best book I've seen about the development of the single market and its repercussions for the integration process.

Kathleen R. McNamara, Georgetown University:

Nicolas Jabko brilliantly and convincingly puts the power and politics back into constructivism, while explaining some of the central puzzles and contradictions of European integration. This terrific book is a riveting primer on how political actors may construct and utilize norms and ideas to further their interests.

Frank Dobbin, Harvard University:

In this fresh look at the surprisingly rapid integration of Europe since the 1980s, Nicolas Jabko shows that it was not market forces or conventional power politics that drove integration. EU officials successfully used the growing power of the idea of the market to push for integration. The argument that relatively weak officials used the power of an idea strategically to trump the material power of opponents is bold and ultimately convincing. Playing the Market will be widely influential for having rewritten the received wisdom on European integration, documented how very malleable the concept of the market is in the hands of strategic actors, and brought us a rich new theory of the strategic use of ideas in politics.

James A. Caporaso, University of Washington:

In Playing the Market, Nicolas Jabko provides an unconventional and thought-provoking interpretation of the 'quiet revolution' that linked in one process the Single European Act (SEA) and the Treaty on European Union (TEU). This is an important book for students of comparative politics and European integration. It must be read by all who want to understand the reorientation of the process of European integration from 1986 into the new millennium.

Mark Blyth, The Johns Hopkins University:

In Playing the Market Nicolas Jabko shows how the European Commission sold the notion of 'the market' as meaning different things to different audiences. To economic interests the market was sold as a constraint and as an emerging norm of regulation; to national governments the market was sold as both a space for development and as a way of strengthening economic autonomy in an era of globalization. By framing the European project in this way, Jabko shows how the Commission was able to promote institutional change in a variety of areas and on a scale far greater than one would predict given their relative power. Bridging rationalism and constructivism, Playing the Market is an excellent piece of scholarship.