This paper investigates why and how French and German leaders converged on an agreement for reforming the European Monetary Union in response to the outbreak of the debt crisis in Europe. To answer these questions, we begin by revising Putnam's two-level game in order to offer a constructivist account of the politics of 'grand bargains' in the European Union. The Eurozone negotiations, we argue, are better viewed as a simultaneous double game in which preferences are constructed and reconfigured as leaders address simultaneously the other European decision makers and their own constituencies. In a discursive institutionalist perspective, a frame analysis is conducted on the basis of press conference speeches and press interviews in 2011 and 2012. It is demonstrated that the FrancoGerman agreements on new policy and institutional arrangements were only possible because the respective leaders resorted to differing discourses in terms of paradigms, norms and values.
This paper deals with the ideas underpinning the EU's socioeconomic governance by focusing on the notion of structural reforms in the framework of the European Semester. It asks which policy ideas are constitutive of the notion of structural reforms in the EU and whether said meaning has changed over time to tackle slow growth and rising inequalities. Our demonstration is mainly grounded on a content analysis of all European Semester documents since 2011 (including Annual Growth Surveys, Alert Mechanism Reports, Euro Area Recommendations, and Country-Specific Recommendations) and completed by a short series of interviews with European and national officials involved in the European Semester. We find that, despite floating meaning, the notion of structural reforms exhibits a persisting core consisting of typically neoliberal policy recipes such as the liberalisation of products and services markets, the deregulation of labour markets, and public administration reform. At the same time, structural reforms have covered eclectic-if not contradictory-policy ideas, thus accompanying a discursive turn towards more fiscal flexibility and (social) investment. Rather than a constructive dynamic towards a renewed agenda, such ambiguity, we argue, reflects a fundamental, asymmetric ongoing battle of ideas within the EU.
The bulk of the literature on 'social Europe' has suggested that social policy at the level of the EU remains to be characterized by the interplay of courts and markets. While we do not disagree with this argument, our objective is to shed light on the European Commission's entrepreneurship, an element which appears to be somewhat bereft of scholarly attention. We show how, by displaying social acuity, defining problems and building teams, the Commission has actively promoted a policy agenda focused on liberal market building at the expense of socially minded regulation. This was however only made possible by a new constellation among the Member States after 2004. We substantiate this claim by documenting the activity of the Commission in two crucial policy domains of the post-Lisbon era: the liberalization of service provision, and the impact of the new macro-economic governance on social policy after the financial and debt crisis.
This paper investigates the bottom-up preference formation over the draft Directive over services liberalization and its impact on co-decision at the European Union (EU) level from the theoretical perspective of discursive institutionalism. Firstly, it is demonstrated that the anti-liberal discourse framed by the French left led President Chirac to reconfigure his strategic interests and embrace a strongly anti-liberal stance against the proposed Directive. Secondly, evidence that the anti-liberal discourse framed by the radical left was very efficient in politicizing the Directive proposal is provided. This forced the governments to act responsively towards public opinions while using communicative discourse in the intergovernmental realm. Since the French position overlapped some of the key actors' preferences, it played a crucial role in altering the initial balance of power. The quest for a compromise securing a super-qualified majority within the European Parliament implied both the use of communicative discourse against the Bolkestein proposal and the relative neutralization of its anti-liberal aspects.
The notion of ownership is well known in relation to global governance. In the realm of EU macro‐economic coordination, it has become a buzzword since the revamping process of the European Semester in 2015. This article investigates how ownership by four types of domestic actors (governments, administrations, parliaments and social partners) manifests itself in the European Semester. We conceptualize three types of ownership, namely institutional, political, and cognitive. Using network analysis, semi‐structured interviews, and a small‐scale survey, we find that ownership is strongest among governments and administrations which are able to shape the outputs of the European Semester (institutional ownership) with little political disagreement (political ownership). While national parliaments display low levels of all types of ownership, employers and unions exhibit relatively strong cognitive ownership. We conclude that the European Semester remains a bureaucratic process contributing to building a multi‐level administrative space rather than an arena for political debates.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.