Conference Agenda

The public debates on the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic were different. The Eurozone crisis was framed as an asymmetric and endogenous crisis caused by the misconduct of a few national governments accumulating unsustainably high debt levels. Fear of moral hazard led to an intergovernmental crisis response of austerity measures and structural reforms. The Covid-19 economic crisis was framed as exogenous and more symmetric. For the first time, the European Union’s (EU) recovery plan NextGenerationEU (NGEU) allowed centralized borrowing to finance recovery spending and reforms in the member states, a previously insurmountable red line for many. The focus moved to public spending and capacity building to increase future resilience to crises including a green and digital transition. Against this background, we ask: To what extent do we see a paradigm shift in parliamentary debates on EU economic governance, and who drives potential transformations?

We conduct a Discourse Network Analysis (DNA) on parliamentary debates on the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and the Covid-19 economic recovery efforts in the national parliaments of Austria, Germany, France and Greece and in the European Parliament. This allows us to capture different economic traditions and crisis contexts in a multilevel setting. DNA is ideal to investigate how debate coalitions form around (dominant) actors and ideas by capturing patterns of (dis-)agreement. We focus on key macroeconomic ideologies (Neoliberalism, Ordoliberalism, Monetarism, Keynesianism) and on different responsibility frames (moral hazard, solidarity, risk-sharing vs. risk-reduction, intergovernmentalism vs. supranationalism). Rather than a sudden break with existing economic ideas and goals, we find an incremental transformation of economic instruments although we identify different ideological, geographical and government-opposition dynamics in different institutional settings.

Most EU legislation is prepared informally in a process known as trilogues where representatives from the European Parliament, the Council, and the Commission meet to reach a compromise before the first formal reading of the proposal. But how do the representatives navigate the cross-pressures of defending the mandate given to them by their institution, the pressure to reach a workable compromise, and to pursue their own political preferences? Previous studies have focused on the autonomy for these relais actors to pursue their own interests (Brandsma & Hoppe, 2021; Reh, 2014). Drawing on principal-agent theory and sociological institutionalism, this study broadens the scope and looks at all three sets of pressures and how they are balanced in practice. The study is based on comprehensive interview material with participants in trilogues at both technical and political level as well as ethnographic observations. It contributes to our understanding of the EU legislative process in three ways: first, it explores how different in intra-institutional procedures offer different opportunities and constraints for each relais actor. Second, it contrasts the interest-based account of the relais actors pursuing their own preferences with considerations of norms and appropriate behaviour vis-à-vis their home institutions. Third, temporal dynamics are included to probe whether the weighting of different considerations changes over time, both within a single trilogue meeting and over the course of a trilogue process.

Representatives of the EU member states negotiate in many preparatory bodies which constitute the Council. They prove to be very effective at reaching decisions, as most issues are already decided before reaching the ministers, and usually there are either no votes against or very limited opposition. In this paper, I focus on different ways in which these officials understand what they do in order to reach decisions. In particular, I am interested in the meanings of concepts such us “consensus” and “compromise”. I want to ground these meanings in the experience and sense-making of national officials. This type of interpretive approach to concepts is called “elucidation” (cf. Schaffer 2015).

Empirically, the paper is based on in-depth interviews conducted during my ongoing field research in Brussels. I ask how the officials perceive the so-called “culture of consensus” in the Council, what are the responsibilities of different actors regarding consensus seeking, what is the difference between consensus and compromise (if any) and how the different ways of reaching decisions co-exist in their work. I use practice-oriented framework and analyse what the representatives do as various decision-making practices (such as the practice of consensus), or socially recognisable, patterned, meaningful action which can be performed at varying degrees of competence.