Resilient Neoliberalism

The paper seeks to contribute to the debate on economic crisis, policy change, and the resilience of neoliberalism by comparing the policy responses of a selected group of peripheral European countries (East and West). Looking at recent reforms targeting the financial sector and/or indebted house owners and the housing regime, we identify three policy responses to the Great Recession. Some countries (Ireland and Estonia) have embraced neoliberalism either enthusiastically or at least without much debate, while other have also by and large stuck to the neoliberal policy paradigm, but only reluctantly (Spain and Slovenia). A third group of countries has rejected neoliberal solutions (Iceland and Hungary). To account for the different policy responses, we will take a look at domestic and international factors, and their interaction in two distinct time periods: the “fat years” of the 2000s, and the “lean years” from 2008/09 onwards. We argue that a) the degree of tensions that built up during the 2000s and policy alternatives that actors could draw on during crisis years differed systematically with the capitalist regime type ((neo)liberal market economies vs mixed market economies), and b) that the difference in the latter group between countries embracing neoliberalism reluctantly versus rejecting it altogether depends on i)the presence or absence of political entrepreneurs that could exploit the grave social tensions, and ii) on Eurozone membership.