Framing the Political Economy of the Eurozone

This contribution addresses the political economy of the Eurozone building upon a strand of economic analysis that represents interdependencies at intermediate levels of aggregation. It is argued that the further step is to use those models not only for studying economic interdependencies but also as heuristics for interdependencies that are potentially both economic and political. The research programme advocated here can be seen as compatible with approaches outside economic analysis that do investigate intermediate levels of aggregation such as sectors (McCormick) but are not based on explicit models of interdependencies.This contribution outlines a conceptual shift through two analytical steps. First, it argues that alternative representations of division in society provide a heuristics that goes beyond the economic sphere strictly conceived and that can be used as investigative tool for the political economy at large. Second, it maintains that alternative representations of productive interdependencies can be used for political economy analysis. This approach provides the building blocks for studying the 'material constitution' of the Eurozone, by which we mean the set of relatively persistent interdependencies among its units, which span the economic and political spheres.