Elisabetta Gualmini

Resilient Liberalism in Europe's Political Economy: State transformation in Italy and France: Technocratic versus political leadership on the road from non-liberalism to neo-liberalism

Although Italy and France have seemingly little in common – given differences in economic profile, state capacity, leadership effectiveness, vulnerability to the economic crisis, and more – they both nevertheless can be categorized as part of a third variety of capitalism: state-influenced market economies (SMEs). In such political economies, the state intervenes more, for better or for worse, and differently than in liberal market economies like the United Kingdom and Ireland or in coordinated market economies like Germany and Sweden. However, what distinguishes these SMEs from other varieties of capitalism is not just their institutional configuration. Equally important are the underlying ideational legacies that underpin the institutions, shaping the ways in which actors have defined and remade markets and how they have engaged in ‘acting out change’ against a background of national traditions of economic thought, of state intervention, and of decades of lived economic practice. Postwar SMEs are distinguished from the other postwar varieties of capitalism by their very different stewardship of the economy through ‘non-liberal’ (defined as violating neo-liberal tenets) institutions of planning, industrial policy, and/or public enterprise. These in turn constituted historical legacies that left their traces even as the state liberalized from the 1980s onwards. In Italy, the countrys ‘state-assisted’ capitalism, or ‘public neo-capitalism’, continued to ‘muddle through’ after the postwar years, leading at best ‘by indirection’ except at times when and/or in areas where technocratic elites took over. In France, political elites transformed the countrys postwar non-liberal ‘state-led’ capitalism, or dirigisme , through the dirigiste retreat from dirigisme that resulted in the ‘post- dirigisme ’ of the 1980s onwards.