Conference Agenda

We would like to organise an “authors meet critics” panel on the forthcoming co-authored monograph in which we are presenting the findings of our ERC project. Each panelist will provide a critique of our book from their particular scholars perspective, which will then we the basis for a rejonder by Roland Erne and a general discussion.

Erne, R., Stan, S., Golden, D., Szabó, I. and Maccarrone, V. (2024) Politicising commodification. European integration and labour politics from the financial crisis to the Covid emergency. Cambridge University Press.

See. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/politicising-commodification/7208F2FA88BEBEE45382E11D2FA6982C

This book examines the new economic governance (NEG) regime that the EU adopted after 2008. Its novel research design captures the supranational formulation of NEG prescriptions and their uneven deployment across countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), policy areas (employment relations, public services), and sectors (transport, water, healthcare). NEG led to a much more vertical mode of EU integration, and its commodification agenda unleashed a plethora of union and social-movement protests, including transnationally. The book presents findings that are crucial for the prospects of European democracy, as labour politics is essential in framing the struggles about the direction of NEG along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU axis. To shed light on corresponding processes at EU level, it upscales insights on the historical role that labour movements have played in the development of democracy and welfare states.

In the book, we are proposing three conceptual innovations for study of EU integration through law, extra-legal economic governage tools,and social conflict. First, we shift from the classical distinction of negative and positive integration (Scharpf, 1999) to one that distinguishes horizontal and vertical integration modes (Erne, 2018). Second, we propose to go beyond the classical, state-centred (intergovernmental or supranational) paradigms of EU law and political science, as we have found that the EU’s NEG regime mimics the corporate governance regime that TNCs use to steer the activities of their subsidiaries and their workforce (Erne, 2015). Finally, we pursue an analytical approach that complements existing EU politicisation studies, which assess the salience of Eurosceptic views in media debates, opinion polls, elections, and referenda, as we must study EU politicisation also at the meso level of interest politics (Zürn, 2016; Erne, 2023a). After all, the political cleavages that structure national politics have neither been created in individuals’ minds at the micro level nor were they simply an outcome of systemic macro-level changes (Bartolini, 2000).