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What “Brussels” means by structural reforms: empty signifier or constructive ambiguity?

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Abstract

This paper deals with the ideas underpinning the EU’s socio-economic 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.

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Notes

  1. All the CSRs were broken down in sub-recommendations in case they were referring to different reforms. As a rule, it was decided to split the CSRs whenever a new action verb was identified. We left out the considérants.

  2. It should be noted that, insofar as we already had a clear idea at this stage of what structural reforms were referring to, the fact that the CSRs made no mention of the term ‘structural reform(s)’ was not deemed problematic for the analysis.

  3. The interviews were conducted in 2016 with key officials from the European Commission as well as officials in four Member States namely Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and the UK. As these countries belong to the socio-economic core of the EU, this helps us to grasp the routine or average functioning of the Semester better than in extreme country cases where conditionality attached to financial assistance programmes made for very asymmetric power relations between the EU and national authorities.

  4. The broad term euro crisis is deliberately used to reflect the multifaceted nature of the crisis affecting the EU, starting with the US financial crisis provoking a banking crisis in Europe, followed by a sovereign debt crisis, threatening the Eurozone and eventually an economic recession feeding a broader social and even political crisis.

  5. Structural Reforms and Fiscal Consolidation: Trade-Offs or Complements?, Website Of Bundesfinanzministerium, retrieved from http://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/ (accessed 20 February 2017).

  6. We differ from Hemerijk in that we only focus on recommendations pertaining directly to the welfare state, thus leaving aside reforms related to finance, taxation, the single market, and energy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université libre de Bruxelles, CEVIPOL CP 124, Avenue Jeanne 44, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Amandine Crespy

  2. Université libre de Bruxelles, CEVIPOL CP 172, Avenue F. D. Roosevelt 39, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

    Pierre Vanheuverzwijn

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  1. Amandine Crespy
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  2. Pierre Vanheuverzwijn
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Correspondence to Amandine Crespy.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 3 Coding scheme for Fig. 4
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Crespy, A., Vanheuverzwijn, P. What “Brussels” means by structural reforms: empty signifier or constructive ambiguity?. Comp Eur Polit 17, 92–111 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-017-0111-0

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