The EU’s management of the euro crisis: a discursive policy analysis

Abstract

This thesis aims to characterise and analyse the political strategies pursued by the EU institutions and the national governments of its member states in order to manage the so-called European sovereign debt crisis (2009-2013). By relying on a discursive perspective on policy analysis, it departs from the basic analytical assumption that the development of the crisis was constructed through meaning-making practices: the nature of a crisis is never simply determined by ‘objective’ dislocations, but rather, amid the radical uncertainty provoked by the economic downturn, some actors imposed onto others their diagnosis of ‘what had gone wrong’ and thus ‘what had to be done’. In the light of this perspective, four research questions guide the thesis: what were the main ideational underpinnings of the discursive construction of the euro crisis? Why did the ordoliberal construal of the crisis, at the centre of these underpinnings, become the dominant one at the EU level? How was the austerity-based management of the euro crisis legitimised despite the regressive, inefficient and unpopular consequences that this policy strategy implied? What have the main consequences been of the institutionalised discursive construction of the euro crisis for the economic governance of the European and Monetary Union? Overall, the research seeks to understand why the scale and depth of the Great Recession in the Eurozone was met with a commensurate revaluation of the pre-crisis modes of European integration. In order to answer these questions, the thesis first describes and problematises the main policies and institutional reforms adopted in the EU in response to the euro crisis. Secondly, it identifies the signifying practices that led to the construction of the European sovereign debt crisis as a problem of ‘wasteful Southern states’ that required the application of austerity and internal devaluation measures. And thirdly, it explores the constitution of competing discursive coalitions on the basis of rival rhetorical strategies and political projects. There are three main discursive strategies identified as key in providing the political conditions for possible austerity in the EU: the depoliticisation of economic – particularly budgetary – policy, the articulation of a discourse on social and economic development focused on the notion of competitiveness, and the deployment of anti-populist discourses in order to marginalise worries about fiscal consolidation programmes. The first three journal articles of the thesis – which is a compilation of articles, not a monograph – study each of these discursive articulations. The fourth departs slightly from the focus of the thesis; by relying on the policy learning approach, it analyses the development of the idea of austerity in the post-crisis context, and therefore studies the aftermath of the management of the euro crisis rather than its management as such.