The European Redistributive State and a European Law of Struggle

Abstract

Its more central involvement in the government of economic and fiscal policy requires a new public law for the EU. This must be alive to the positive, negative and intractable qualities of conflicts associated with these fields. Such a law would internalise conflicts within the political process so that their irresolution and ongoing struggle become the dynamo endowing the Union with qualities of political engagement, imagination and justice. The recent reforms make mediation of conflicts a central mission of the Union but still use the public law structures of the regulatory state which lack these three qualities.

O zmianie instytucjonalnej w Europie w okresie kryzysu

“…K³opot polega na nieformalnooeci i dyskrecjonalnooeci nowych zasad ustrojowych. Jak okreoeli³ to jeden z wybitnych znawców prawa europejskiego (Chalmers, 2012) -wspó³czesna Europa nie ma odpowiednich instytucji politycznych i niezbêdnych regulacji prawa publicznego, które pomog³yby rozstrzygaae spory interesów miêdzy ró¿nymi grupami obywateli, w tym m.in. w zakresie redystrybucji podatków.…”

Socializing the European Semester? Economic Governance and Social Policy Coordination in Europe 2020

“…The European Semester brings together within a single annual policy coordination cycle a wide range of EU governance instruments with different legal bases and sanctioning authority, from the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), the Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure (MIP), and the Fiscal Treaty to the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Integrated Economic and Employment Policy Guidelines. This process in turn has given the EU institutions a more visible and intrusive role than ever before in scrutinizing and guiding national economic, fiscal, and social policies, especially but by no means exclusively within the Eurozone (Costamagna 2013;Chalmers 2012).…”

EU experimentalist governance in times of crisis

“…The hierarchical character of EU economic governance has likewise been deliberately strengthened through a succession of crisis-inspired measures such as the Six-Pack, Fiscal Treaty, and Two-Pack, which subject member states' fiscal, budgetary, and macroeconomic policies to increasingly close scrutiny by the Commission and the Council through the new 'European Semester' of policy coordination, backed up by stronger and putatively more 'automatic' sanctions for persistent failures to correct excessive deficits and imbalances. Such developments have been widely viewed as a substantial increase in executive power within the EU (Chalmers 2012;Crum 2013;Curtin 2014), whether understood as the ascendancy of intergovernmentalism (Bickerton et al 2015), the reinforcement of supranationalism (Bauer and Becker 2014), or a combination of the two (Dawson 2015).…”