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Crisis, cambio en la UE y estrategias sindicales: el impacto de la condicionalidad en el repertorio estratégico de los sindicatos españoles durante la crisis de la eurozona ResumenDurante la crisis de la eurozona, los gobiernos del PSOE y del PP implementaron una serie de reformas del Estado de Bienestar y del mercado laboral a cambio de ayuda financiera por parte de la Unión Europea, lo que se conoce como condicionalidad. Los sindicatos, CC. OO. y UGT, respondieron ante tales reformas como representantes de los colectivos más afectados por las mismas. Existen dos argumentos distintos que explican las estrategias de los sindicatos durante la crisis. Por una parte, se argumenta que los sindicatos utilizaron la acción política tradicional para influir en los procesos de toma de decisiones. Por otra parte, los sindicatos han puesto en marcha nuevas acciones bien de carácter transnacional o relacionadas con actividades propias de los movimientos sociales. El artículo explica por qué la crisis dio lugar a esta nueva combinación de repertorios sindicales que apelan a sectores y niveles de acción distintos. El argumento principal es que la condicionalidad de la UE dio lugar a la aparición de un nuevo régimen de decisión política que denominamos aquí «intergubernamentalismo neoliberal» por los cambios institucionales e ideológicos que trajo consigo. A su vez este nuevo régimen impactó en la estructura de oportunidad política, provocando una reorientación estratégica de los sindicatos. AbstractDuring the eurozone crisis, the PSOE's and PP's governments implemented a series of reforms of the Welfare State and the labour market in exchange for financial help from the EU; what is known as conditionality. The trade unions, CC. OO. and UGT, responded to these reforms as the representatives of the sectors most affected by them. There are two narratives to explain trade unions' strategies during the crisis. On the one hand, it is argued that trade unions used traditional political action to influence political decision making processes. On the other hand, trade unions have developed new actions either of a transnational character or related to typical social movements' activities. The article explains why the crisis led to this new combination of trade union repertories calling on different sectors and levels of action. The main argument is that the EU conditionality led to the emergence of a new political regime that we have dubbed "neoliberal intergovernmentalism" due to the institutional and ideological changes that it brought about. In turn, this new regime impacted upon the political opportunity structure, triggering a strategic reorientation of trade unions.

In the context of the 2004 Enlargement, several EU governments reformed their social legislation to restrict the access to benefits of job-seeking or inactive EU citizens. Many of these restrictions were in tension with the case-law of the European Court of Justice, but when it came to judge their compatibility with EU law, the ECJ was more lenient than many anticipated. This article analyses this shift in ECJ case-law by looking at the dialogue between the Court and national authorities against the backdrop of EU legislative reform. It demonstrates that Member States contributed to the evolution of case-law by ‘pushing the boundaries’ of EU law both domestically and before the Court. It shows in particular how closely the arguments presented before the Court by national judiciaries or governments correlate with the new interpretations adopted by the Court itself. This is illustrated with empirical evidence from the UK and Germany.

Legal uncertainty may hinder the effective implementation of public policies. Still, the political and legal dynamics that underpin its persistence are underexplored. This article proposes that legal uncertainty is more likely to persist in multi-level political and legal systems where actors with authority on the same issue hold different interpretations of rules. Also, it suggests that, under these conditions, actors can use legal uncertainty as an opportunity to advance their own interests. We illustrate this argument by investigating the legal uncertainty concerning EU citizens’ access to social benefits in Germany. Through the analysis of social legislation and courts’ rulings, the article shows that different interpretations of EU law by domestic actors hindered the possibilities of settling uncertainty: national courts of different levels used litigation processes and referrals to the Court of Justice of the European Union to advance their legal interpretations and the German government profited from the uncertainty to exclude EU citizens from social benefits.

One of the consequences of the Eurozone crisis was the collapse of social concertation. Some authors have explained that the need for fiscal retrenchment deprived governments of resources to offer concessions to trade unions (Regan, 2013). Although these explanations partly explain why social partnership ended, we do not yet know how political actors achieved this institutional change, neither which ideas they used to legitimate it. This article adopts a discursive institutionalist framework (Schmidt, 2008, 2010) to identify the ideas and the causal mechanisms through which political leaders were able to exercise ideational power in a paradigmatic case study: Ireland. The article argues that external constraints during the crisis empowered specific political actors that used the crisis as a 'moment of political opportunity' (Béland, 2005, p. 10) to end the social partnership model. They constructed a communicative discourse to legitimise this change based on the ideas that social partnership was dysfunctional and undemocratic.

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In the last decade, five Eurozone governments in economic difficulty received assistance from international lenders on condition that certain policies specified in the Memoranda of Understanding were implemented. What room of manoeuvre did the governments of these countries have? After conditionality, to what extent were governments willing and able to roll back changes imposed on them by the international lenders? Do we find variation across governments, and if so, why?This paper addresses those questions, summarizing the main findings of our book (Moury et al. 2021) on constraints on national executives in the five bailed out countries of the Eurozone during and beyond the crisis (2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019). We show that, despite international market pressure and creditors' conditionality, governments had some room for manoeuvre during a bail out and were able to advocate, resist, shape or roll back some of the policies demanded by external actors. Under certain circumstances, domestic actors were also able to exploit the constraint of conditionality to their own advantage. The paper additionally shows that after a bail-out programme governments could use their discretion to revert the measures which bring the greatest benefits at a lower cost.