Signed in 1992, the Maastricht Treaty represented the victory of neoliberalism in the European Union, as expressed by the single market and the single currency. Since then, democracy has steadily retreated across the European Union, accompanied by a collapse of popular sovereignty — the power of workers and the poor materially to affect their conditions of life and work.

The declining power of workers and the poor is especially apparent in the economic domain — perhaps the most important component of government policy. Within the European single market and the single currency, economic policy has in fact become increasingly detached from parliamentary elections. Once a government is in power, policies are broadly dictated by the demands of the “economy,” which largely means the European Union’s neoliberal establishment.

In fact, even in Britain — not a signatory to the Fiscal Compact of 2012 that reaffirmed the European Union’s neoliberal attachment to austerity — the framework of self-imposed austerity since the crisis of 2007–9 has explicitly sought to comply with the stipulations of the Maastricht Treaty (the public debt and fiscal deficit not exceeding 60 percent and 3 percent of GDP, respectively).