EU economic governance and austerity: Exploring recent perspectives

Abstract

This paper presents some of the main theoretical approaches which examine changes in the EU economic governance system during the current crisis. We review standard approaches of EU studies (neo-functionalism, liberal inter-governmentalism, and historical institutionalism), Marxist-regulationist political economists, and Bourdieusian sociologists. The paper illustrates how scholars utilize given intellectual tools to understand ongoing trends of political and institutional change.We suggest that Bourdieusian sociologists may be in a relatively better position to interpret governance reforms and this is briefly illustrated by looking at some empirical observations from researching the effect of EU economic governance reform on the management of public assets in Greece.