Continuity despite crises: Germany’s euro policy in the light of the pandemic, war and inflation

Schoeller, Magnus G.; Heidebrecht, Sebastian

doi:10.1080/13501763.2023.2218883

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 51 publications

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“…Some also argued that European leaders had 'learned' from past experience and failures regarding those policies that 'work' or not, (Ladi & Wolff, 2021). Other scholars, though, suggested that the enactment of NextGenerationEU amounted to little more than a new step through which the EU was continuously 'failing forward' (Howarth & Quaglia, 2021) and stressed the limitations in terms of conditionality and limited duration of the recovery package (Schoeller & Heidebrecht, 2023). As a matter of fact, none of the ideas or instruments focussing on fiscal discipline have been eliminated.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

Crespy,

Massart,

Schmidt

2023

Journal of European Public Policy

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This paper explains how a turn in EU governance which was unthinkable only a few months prior became possible in 2020. Rather than a sudden paradigm shift brought about by the pandemic, we argue that it occurred through successive episodes of reinterpreting the rules and layering on new instruments while fostering investment and fiscal sharing on top of the pre-existing ordoliberal regime. Through a discursive institutionalist lens, the paper supports these claims by studying the frames and narratives of French, German and EU leaders during three rounds of reforms, namely the flexibilization of the European Semester (2014)(2015)(2016), the adoption of the Budgetary Instrument for Convergence and Competitiveness (BICC) (2017-2019), and the adoption of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (2020-2021). The analysis shows that an increased awareness of a responsiveness imperative, going beyond national constituencies, transformed European elites' conceptions of 'responsible' government thus at least momentarily closing the gap between responsibility and responsiveness.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

Crespy,

Massart,

Schmidt

2023

Journal of European Public Policy

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Embedding past, present and future crises: time and the political construction of the Covid-19 pandemic in the EU

Crespy,

Massart,

Moreira Ramalho

2024

Journal of European Integration

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This paper investigates the construction of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis by EU elites. It addresses the puzzling relationship between the spread of the new virus with a large-scale reconfiguration of economic governance in the EU which was unimaginable a few months earlier. Drawing from a constructivist approach to political economy, we argue that the discursive construal and framing of this crisis was instrumental to embed the emergency of the pandemic with broader levels of conjunctural, historical, and even civilizational temporal references. Providing a frame analysis of public statements by the heads of the European Commission, the European Council, and European Central Bank during 2020, we show how the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 was framed as a catalyst for tackling the EU's historical crisis of purpose, the socioeconomic imbalances left over from the euro crisis, as well as the predicament of the climate crisis.

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Ideational robustness of economic ideas in action: the case of European Union economic governance through a decade of crisis

Carstensen,

Schmidt

2024

Policy and Society

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Is it possible to develop a robust crisis management response in a system where governance is characterized by coercive power and adversarial bargaining rather than the diversity, inclusion, and openness highlighted by extant scholarship as conducive factors for robustness? Using two instances of crisis in the European Union—the Eurozone crisis (2010‒2015) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020‒2022)—the paper argues that how actors reinterpret existing rules and institutions offers an important source of robustness in crisis management. Based on the employment of a disaggregation of robustness into degrees of robustness, as well as the concepts of ideational and institutional power, we show how actors can counter the coercive power of dominant coalitions and open up for rule adaptation through reinterpretations of existing rules that, at least in the short term, can solidify the functioning of existing institutions faced by turbulence. In the context of the Eurozone crisis, ideational and institutional power thus enabled a moderately robust response without treaty reform. In the case of the pandemic, it was possible to convince (particularly German) policymakers of the need to employ new ideas about common debt. This meant less need to employ ideational and institutional power by other actors, leading to significantly more effective crisis management than in the Eurozone crisis, what the paper terms maximal robustness.

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Continuity despite crises: Germany’s euro policy in the light of the pandemic, war and inflation

Cited by 4 publications

References 51 publications

How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

Embedding past, present and future crises: time and the political construction of the Covid-19 pandemic in the EU

Ideational robustness of economic ideas in action: the case of European Union economic governance through a decade of crisis

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