Fielding Supranationalism: The European Central Bank as a Field Effect

Abstract

The European Central Bank (ECB), like all European institutions, poses basic problems of definition and comparability. Mobilizing Bourdieusian field theory (BFT) to resolve them, we map out the ECB's deep investments in scientific prestige and scholarly productivity -that is, its hyper-scientization -and the ambiguities therein, and then set out to explain them. Mobilizing diverse sources that include official documents, on-site interviews, and comparative data, we argue that hyper-scientization is a field effect expressing the ECB's origins and cross-location in three worlds: financial institutions, professional economics, and European politics. We then trace out the signs and symptoms of cross-location. First, we trace the origins of the ECB's directorate for research, DGR, which differentiated the ECB from most other European central banks at the time of its founding. Thus invested, the ECB accelerated its scholarly activities in step with the internationalization and scientization of economics. But this also expressed the ECB's stake in European authority struggles: research exchanges are a means of building relationships with national central banks, which was especially crucial in the lead-up to the European Union's (EU) 2004 enlargement. We thus argue that there is more to the ECB than its independence and policy operations, and that some of its most striking features are best explained as effects of its multiple field locations.

The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund

“…The former strand is one of the oldest research traditions, with most work focusing on policy outcomes, administrative culture or institutional autonomy (Hawtrey 1925;Day 1961;Young and Ho Park 2013;Zahariadis 2013;Lombardi and Moschella 2016). More recently, the focus on the economic ideas of central bankers and international financial institutions (IFI) economists has become a focal point in this research (Chwieroth 2009;Moschella 2012;Braun 2016;Johnson 2016;Mudge and Vauchez 2016;Grabel 2018;Thiemann 2019), with some work highlighting the heterogeneity of economic ideas within these institutions and, with it, the challenge to explain how official policy doctrines come from internal struggles (Ban 2015;Clift 2018) that often lead institutions to rationally learn the wrong lessons (Matthijs and Blyth 2018). In this field of debate André Broome and Leonard Seabrooke (2015) have shifted the debate towards organizational capacity, with some actors such as the IMF deploying adequate resources to facilitate learning by doing ('situated learning') for local technocrats steeped in local economic ideas and norms (Coletti and Radaelli 2013).…”

Why and how do think tanks expand their networks in times of crisis? The case of Bruegel and the Centre for European Policy Studies

“…Nonetheless, at the beginning of the eurozone crisis in 2010, EU institutional actors and international organizations such as the IMF and the WB commissioned research, while at the same time they sought to strengthen their internal research units and departments (Ban 2015;Mudge and Vauchez 2015;Pautz 2011: 423;Seabrooke and Tsingou 2014). Their need of 'usable knowledge', that is 'accurate information that is of use to politicians and policy makers' (Haas 2004: 574) spectacularly increased, think tanks becoming important actors in the global and European 'knowledge regime' (Campbell and Pedersen 2014;Pautz 2011).…”

“…Although each EU institution has its own office in charge of policy prospection, in 2010 the proportion of in-house academic expertise was relatively reduced. Against this backdrop, Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi stressed the importance of 'scientifically-informed monetary management' (Mudge and Vauchez 2015). Not only technocratic institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) seemed to be inclined to use external expert knowledge, but also the Commission, as well as directly and indirectly elected institutions such as the European Parliament (EP) and the Council sought to boost their legitimacy by calling upon sustainable economic expertise when appropriate.…”

“…Not only technocratic institutions like the European Central Bank (ECB) seemed to be inclined to use external expert knowledge, but also the Commission, as well as directly and indirectly elected institutions such as the European Parliament (EP) and the Council sought to boost their legitimacy by calling upon sustainable economic expertise when appropriate. As the debt crisis in Greece worsened, the ECB established its own research unit, delivering with regularity a wide range of studies and reports (Mudge and Vauchez 2015). The Commission increased its staff at the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN).…”

“…These contributions go beyond the postulate according to which economic ideas matter. What this emerging body of research convincingly demonstrates is how certain economic ideas penetrate the fields of power in European Union (EU) and global governance (Ban 2015;Carstensen and Schmidt 2016;Lebaron 2012;Mudge and Vauchez 2015). While the contribution of American economists and experts to the recent financial and economic crisis has been scrutinised in a set of academic articles, little is known about the role of their European counterparts based in Brussels.…”