For decades, European nations appeared to many on the US left as a model of the kind of social democratic society worker power could win: these were countries with large socialist and even communist parties, where labor could flex its muscle in the streets in a way hard to imagine in the United States. They were places, however short of utopia, that featured government-run health care, lengthy paid parental leave, social housing, and long, leisurely vacations.

Today, European politics evokes a persistently rising, anti-migrant far right, a struggling left, and more than a decade of severe political and economic crisis that has provoked intense criticism of the European Union (EU) from left and right alike. The EU has emerged as an elusive and slippery institution that’s difficult to define. It, without a doubt, has been a force for neoliberal discipline, but it has also been an alibi for national leaders who had converted to the neoliberal creed well before Brussels could have made them do so.

The episode of The Dig from which the transcript below is excerpted featured an expansive historical overview of Europe and the EU, from the crises of Keynesian social democratic welfare states of the 1970s and 1980s to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that created the EU — which, in turn, went on to preside over the eurozone crisis that exploded out of the 2008 global financial breakdown.