The political economy of the European Union
The starting-point for this short paper is Rosalind Cavaghan and Anna Elomäki, ‘Dead Ends and Blind Spots in the European Semester: The Epistemological Foundation of the Crisis in Social Reproduction’, recently posted online at the Journal of Common Market Studies, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13288. Their own essay and the other sources they cite (and on which I draw selectively) are based on a wealth of carefully researched empirical material, and a far deeper knowledge of the EU policy-making process than mine. At the same time, they reflect a variety of apparently inconsistent views, and as Copeland and Daly (2018: 1003) say: ‘There is no consensus in the field on the appropriate interpretive framework for social policy in the current period’. My suggestion is that if all the contributions are viewed from the perspective of the politics of global competitiveness, apparent differences and contradictions are reconciled, and a coherent policy orientation emerges, one that is regrettably entirely subservient to the logic of global capital.
The debate over the European Semester (the framework within which social and economic policy in the EU has been made over the last ten years) tends to revolve around the long-standing tensions identified between ‘Economic Europe’ and ‘Social Europe’ (the latter defined by Crespy and Menz (2015: 753) as ‘the pursuit of social (re-)regulation of economic and political processes with a view to taming the inequities arising from market processes’). The dominant view, not surprisingly, is that ‘pro-market’ measures have by and large been winning out over ‘re-regulation’. From the perspective of the politics of global competitiveness, however, the issue is wrongly put if it is put this way. From the starting point that capital itself is a ‘social relation’, and that the source of accumulation is the extraction of surplus value from the worker, a contrast between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ makes no sense. So, a measure may be classed as ‘social’ in the lexicon of the EU or in other similar policy contexts, but may be intended to increase the capacity of capital to extract surplus value from workers, and therefore just as appropriately classified as ‘economic’ in the same lexicon. This is important in practice as many measures addressed in the literature that have a ‘social’ aspect are primarily intended to boost the number of individuals available for paid work, and the flexibility and skills they offer to potential employers, in order to boost competitiveness in the world market. This has been the central element of OECD policy for more than four decades, as I argue in The Politics of Global Competitiveness (49-74), and in Chapter Four I argue that it underpins both the joint initiative between the European Commission, the OECD and the World Bank on ‘under-employment’ and joblessness over the period of the European Semester (106-116), and the more recent European Pillar of Social Rights (130-134). The first of these reflects Marx’s general law of social production, which identifies the need for workers in globally competitive labour markets to be flexible, mobile, and versatile, and the second is path-breaking, in global terms, as the first attempt to constitutionalise that law. The sources I address here all make some reference to the EU competitiveness agenda, as you would expect, but from my perspective none pins down the relationship between competitiveness and social inclusion, which may once have been opposites, but are now virtual synonyms.
Zeitlin and Vanhercke (2018: 152) are the most misleading in this respect. They claim to detect between 2010 and 2016 ‘a partial but progressive “socialization” of the Semester, both in terms of its substantive content and its governance procedures’, putting this down to the ‘strategic agency, reflexive learning and creative adaptation to the new institutional conditions of the European Semester by the key actors, especially on the social and employment side’; and they identify a shift to ‘a more socially balanced stance’ (2012-14) after an initial emphasis on fiscal discipline (157). But among the recommendations they highlight as pushing in this direction the most frequently occurring are those urging member states to improve their education, training, and activation systems, improve skills and training, and enhance educational outcomes and access to the labour market for disadvantaged groups (158). Such recommendations address social and employment policy issues with a view to getting more people into paid employment and raising the skills level of those employed, so while the contrast between social retrenchment and social investment is real, it points more towards a politics of global competitiveness than towards a ‘more socially balanced policy stance’. Their account of the Juncker Commission to 2016 confirms this, and shows that it reinforced the enhanced monitoring and surveillance introduced by Barroso, shattering what was left of autonomy in the making of ‘social policy’. In short, from my perspective, what they regard as a ‘progressive socialization of the Semester’ (167) is a shift from a narrow focus on fiscal discipline and austerity to a broader and more integrated one on employment and competitiveness – a shift that would be clearer if they did not persist in describing DG Employment as a social actor.
Crespy and Menz (2015) also contrast pro-market and ‘re-regulation’ orientations, identifying regulation with Social Europe agenda, but are not fooled into thinking that any retreat was under way from the pursuit of competitiveness. But Crespy and Vanheuverzwijn (2019) take a step backwards, muddying the waters by invoking the concepts of ideational change, ‘empty signifiers’, ‘(constructive) ambiguity’, and ‘fuzziness’, and grounding their analysis on Hemerijck’s contrast between ‘social retrenchment’ and ‘social investment’. Their painstaking empirical research shows that the focus on employability and competitiveness remains in force, and they correctly identify as the central argument of the ‘social investment’ perspective that ‘the State must “prepare” individuals to adapt to new social risks over their life course, instead of simply “repairing” damage through passive cash benefits’ (106). But they persist all the same (Appendix, Table 3, p. 109) in contrasting, inter alia, reforming wage indexation or wage-setting systems, reducing labour costs/ tax wedge on labour, tackling rigidity in employment protection legislation, and reducing incentives to work (classed as social retrenchment) on the one hand with fostering transition from school to work, including apprenticeships and work-based learning), addressing skills mismatches, increasing the employability of target groups, ensuring the link between assistance and activation, tackling early school leaving and developing skills (classified as social investment) on the other. This obscures entirely the organic connections between these policies that a focus on the politics of global competitiveness as set out above reveals.
In contrast, Copeland and Daly (2018: 1002) ‘propose an analytic framework that integrates a focus on the politics of EU social policy with the relationship that EU social policy has with the broader process of European integration (and by implication with other policy fields)’. This perpetuates the dichotomous treatment of ‘economic’ and ‘social’ policy, and shifts the focus away from employability and competitiveness, which almost disappear from view. The problem arising from coding some CSRs (country-specific recommendations) as social in the first place is compounded by their adoption of Wolfgang Streeck’s contrast between market-making and market-correcting policies to classify them, and the consequence can be seen when they cite a 2013 recommendation to the UK as an example (1007):
‘Enhance efforts to support low-income households and reduce child poverty by ensuring that the Universal Credit and other welfare reforms deliver a fair tax-benefit system with clearer work incentives and support services. Accelerate the implementation of planned measures to reduce the costs of childcare and improve its quality and availability’.
They comment: ‘It is not so much the targeting of vulnerable groups that renders this CSR a market-correcting one in our frame but rather: a) the rationale being fairness, b) the identification of child poverty as a matter that needs addressing, and c) the general focus on welfare reform and better services (which involve greater state engagement)’. But this misses the central point: ‘a fair tax-benefit system with clearer work incentives and support services’, with the logic of all associated reforms stemming from the imperative to ‘make work pay’. These measures were not ‘market-correcting’ but rather ‘market-perfecting’. In general, then, their reading of the side-lining and subordination of ‘social’ policy is on the right lines, but does not go far enough.
Similarly, Dawson (2018: 192) suggests that EU social policy ‘is at an uneasy fork in the road’: its coordination ‘seems to have entered a blind alley, without easy escape routes’. His distinction between conditioning the market (aiming at a purely social set of goals) or facilitating market integration (aiming to reconcile integration’s
social and economic objectives) excludes a third possibility – making ‘social’ policy the principal means by which the employability and competitiveness agenda is advanced, even though he is well aware of it, citing the 2016 Annual Growth Survey as follows (p. 201):
‘More effective social protection systems are needed to confront poverty and social inclusion, while preserving sustainable public finances and incentives to work. Any such development will have to continue to ensure that the design of in-work benefits, unemployment benefit and minimum income schemes constitutes an incentive to enter the job market.’
And when he cites the Social Protection Committee in the same year as advocating a degree of flexibility in the development of pensions policy, beyond (upward) ‘adjustments to the statutory pension age’ (p. 205), we find it suggesting that
‘other tools (such as restricting access to early retirement pathways, extending contributory periods, including a life expectancy factor in the benefit calculation formula and/or stepping up efforts in workplaces and labour markets to enable women and men to work longer) also represent valid policy options for increasing the effective retirement age and for adapting pension systems to the changing demographic and economic conditions.’
Dawson makes nothing of the specific content here, and despite the fact that in 2017 the Committee began its assessment of the record of achievement in the previous year with the statement that ‘social policy should be seen as an investment and a productive factor’, he misinterprets its recognition that ‘the recommendations in relation to pension policy, in contrast to previous years, are less prescriptive and leave the necessary policy space for Member States to use the appropriate policy levers’ (p. 206), entirely missing its rich irony. While he can see that social policy had become a matter of making individuals ‘fit for the market’ (207), he cannot quite absorb its full implications, any more than he can imagine a ‘Pillar of Social Rights’ that would in fact be a constitution for global competitiveness. By this point, though, the game was over: ‘social protection’ had been ruthlessly realigned with the perceived requirements for globally competitive labour markets, and the ‘Social Protection’ Committee had become a knowing and active agent in intensifying the politics of competitiveness.
This brings us to Cavaghan and Elomäki, who argue that proponents of ‘neoliberal’ policies are misled by an ’epistemological blind spot’ that leads them to see policies focused on social reproduction as antithetical, whereas they provide the essential underpinning that efficient market-oriented policies require. At first sight, their argument is contradictory, as they wish both to reject the distinction between the social and the economic in favour of a contrast between ‘production’ and ‘social reproduction’, and to insist that policies relating to social reproduction should be viewed as ‘economic’ (‘a foundational economic input’) rather than ‘social’. More worryingly, they risk encouraging a focus on those aspects of social reproduction that can be shown to be ‘foundational economic inputs’, to the detriment of everything else associated with it. The risk is all the greater if, as I believe, EU policy makers don’t have a blind spot at all, but on the contrary, are knowingly set on reshaping activities around social reproduction so that they make the most efficient contribution to the politics of global competitiveness, at the lowest possible cost. The minute you argue that an aspect of ‘social reproduction’ should be protected because of the contribution it makes, short- or long-term, to competitiveness, you are offering up social reproduction as a servant to capitalist accumulation, and delivering it to the logic of the European Semester. This cannot be the authors’ intention.
So, Cavaghan and Elomäki may ‘begin from the assumption that the goal of economic policy should be maximum human welfare’ (5), and I can readily agree. Equally, they may insist that ‘growth and productivity are dependent upon a well-functioning reproductive economy that meets collective human needs for care, nourishment and community’ (6), and that the reproductive economy includes ‘unpaid care, alongside all monetized activities, public or private, that contribute to the maintenance of life (for example care services, welfare benefits, primary education), distinguishing between unpaid and monetized instances of it (7), and so indeed it should be. But the proponents of the politics of global competitiveness don’t think like this. They want to squeeze the maximum amount of productive paid work from the largest possible proportion of the population, and it is no coincidence that ‘stay-at-home mothers’ were a particular target, among others, of the EU-led initiative on joblessness and under-employment. The consequences of squeezing the socially reproductive sector in this way are devastating for communities and for human welfare, but policy-makers clearly don’t see them as detrimental to capital accumulation, and they can point to rising numbers of women in full time as well as part time work, ‘voluntary’ decisions to forego parenthood or delay the birth of the first child well into one’s thirties, rapidly changing family structures in which the ‘nuclear family’ with dependent children is very much the minority, the headlong commodification of all kinds of daily provision, and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of the ‘racialized and migrant women’ on whom the hardest burdens fall as evidence that they have no need to worry for the foreseeable future (Cammack, 2020).
When Cavaghan and Elomäki summarise, on the basis of their detailed review of Annual Growth Surveys, that ‘the AGSs’ commitment to social investment extends only to social reproductive services that provide returns in terms of labour supply and human capital’ (9-10), they are right. But this is not evidence of an epistemological blind spot, but of an uncompromising commitment to the logic of capital, or the politics of global competitiveness. And when they quote the 2013 AGS as saying of the ‘profound restructuring of our economies … currently taking place’ that ‘[t]his process is disruptive … and socially difficult – but it is necessary to lay the foundations for future growth and competitiveness that will be smart, sustainable and inclusive’ (11), the same point applies.
References
Cammack, Paul (2020), ‘Marx on Social Reproduction’, Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cavaghan, Rosalind and Elomäki, Anna (2021), ‘Dead Ends and Blind Spots in the European Semester: The Epistemological Foundation of the Crisis in Social Reproduction’, Journal of Common Market Studies, online first.
Copeland, Paul, and Mary Daly (2018) ‘The European Semester and EU Social Policy’. Journal of Common Market Studies, 56, 5, 1001–18.
Crespy, Amandine, and George Menz (2015) ‘Commission Entrepreneurship and the Debasing of Social Europe Before and After the Eurocrisis,’ Journal of Common Market Studies, 53, 4, 753–768.
Crespy, Amandine and Vanheuverzwijn, P. (2019) ‘What Brussels Means by Structural Reforms: Empty Signifier or Constructive Ambiguity?’, Comparative European Politics, 17, 1, 92–111.
Dawson, Mark (2018) ‘New Governance and the Displacement of Social Europe: The Case of the European Semester’, European Constitutional Law Review, 14, 191–209.
Zeitlin, John and Bart Vanhercke (2018) ‘Socializing the European Semester: EU Social and Economic Policy Co-ordination in Crisis and Beyond’, Journal of European Public Policy, 25, 2, 149–74.
The debate over the European Semester (the framework within which social and economic policy in the EU has been made over the last ten years) tends to revolve around the long-standing tensions identified between ‘Economic Europe’ and ‘Social Europe’ (the latter defined by Crespy and Menz (2015: 753) as ‘the pursuit of social (re-)regulation of economic and political processes with a view to taming the inequities arising from market processes’). The dominant view, not surprisingly, is that ‘pro-market’ measures have by and large been winning out over ‘re-regulation’. From the perspective of the politics of global competitiveness, however, the issue is wrongly put if it is put this way. From the starting point that capital itself is a ‘social relation’, and that the source of accumulation is the extraction of surplus value from the worker, a contrast between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ makes no sense. So, a measure may be classed as ‘social’ in the lexicon of the EU or in other similar policy contexts, but may be intended to increase the capacity of capital to extract surplus value from workers, and therefore just as appropriately classified as ‘economic’ in the same lexicon. This is important in practice as many measures addressed in the literature that have a ‘social’ aspect are primarily intended to boost the number of individuals available for paid work, and the flexibility and skills they offer to potential employers, in order to boost competitiveness in the world market. This has been the central element of OECD policy for more than four decades, as I argue in The Politics of Global Competitiveness (49-74), and in Chapter Four I argue that it underpins both the joint initiative between the European Commission, the OECD and the World Bank on ‘under-employment’ and joblessness over the period of the European Semester (106-116), and the more recent European Pillar of Social Rights (130-134). The first of these reflects Marx’s general law of social production, which identifies the need for workers in globally competitive labour markets to be flexible, mobile, and versatile, and the second is path-breaking, in global terms, as the first attempt to constitutionalise that law. The sources I address here all make some reference to the EU competitiveness agenda, as you would expect, but from my perspective none pins down the relationship between competitiveness and social inclusion, which may once have been opposites, but are now virtual synonyms.
Zeitlin and Vanhercke (2018: 152) are the most misleading in this respect. They claim to detect between 2010 and 2016 ‘a partial but progressive “socialization” of the Semester, both in terms of its substantive content and its governance procedures’, putting this down to the ‘strategic agency, reflexive learning and creative adaptation to the new institutional conditions of the European Semester by the key actors, especially on the social and employment side’; and they identify a shift to ‘a more socially balanced stance’ (2012-14) after an initial emphasis on fiscal discipline (157). But among the recommendations they highlight as pushing in this direction the most frequently occurring are those urging member states to improve their education, training, and activation systems, improve skills and training, and enhance educational outcomes and access to the labour market for disadvantaged groups (158). Such recommendations address social and employment policy issues with a view to getting more people into paid employment and raising the skills level of those employed, so while the contrast between social retrenchment and social investment is real, it points more towards a politics of global competitiveness than towards a ‘more socially balanced policy stance’. Their account of the Juncker Commission to 2016 confirms this, and shows that it reinforced the enhanced monitoring and surveillance introduced by Barroso, shattering what was left of autonomy in the making of ‘social policy’. In short, from my perspective, what they regard as a ‘progressive socialization of the Semester’ (167) is a shift from a narrow focus on fiscal discipline and austerity to a broader and more integrated one on employment and competitiveness – a shift that would be clearer if they did not persist in describing DG Employment as a social actor.
Crespy and Menz (2015) also contrast pro-market and ‘re-regulation’ orientations, identifying regulation with Social Europe agenda, but are not fooled into thinking that any retreat was under way from the pursuit of competitiveness. But Crespy and Vanheuverzwijn (2019) take a step backwards, muddying the waters by invoking the concepts of ideational change, ‘empty signifiers’, ‘(constructive) ambiguity’, and ‘fuzziness’, and grounding their analysis on Hemerijck’s contrast between ‘social retrenchment’ and ‘social investment’. Their painstaking empirical research shows that the focus on employability and competitiveness remains in force, and they correctly identify as the central argument of the ‘social investment’ perspective that ‘the State must “prepare” individuals to adapt to new social risks over their life course, instead of simply “repairing” damage through passive cash benefits’ (106). But they persist all the same (Appendix, Table 3, p. 109) in contrasting, inter alia, reforming wage indexation or wage-setting systems, reducing labour costs/ tax wedge on labour, tackling rigidity in employment protection legislation, and reducing incentives to work (classed as social retrenchment) on the one hand with fostering transition from school to work, including apprenticeships and work-based learning), addressing skills mismatches, increasing the employability of target groups, ensuring the link between assistance and activation, tackling early school leaving and developing skills (classified as social investment) on the other. This obscures entirely the organic connections between these policies that a focus on the politics of global competitiveness as set out above reveals.
In contrast, Copeland and Daly (2018: 1002) ‘propose an analytic framework that integrates a focus on the politics of EU social policy with the relationship that EU social policy has with the broader process of European integration (and by implication with other policy fields)’. This perpetuates the dichotomous treatment of ‘economic’ and ‘social’ policy, and shifts the focus away from employability and competitiveness, which almost disappear from view. The problem arising from coding some CSRs (country-specific recommendations) as social in the first place is compounded by their adoption of Wolfgang Streeck’s contrast between market-making and market-correcting policies to classify them, and the consequence can be seen when they cite a 2013 recommendation to the UK as an example (1007):
‘Enhance efforts to support low-income households and reduce child poverty by ensuring that the Universal Credit and other welfare reforms deliver a fair tax-benefit system with clearer work incentives and support services. Accelerate the implementation of planned measures to reduce the costs of childcare and improve its quality and availability’.
They comment: ‘It is not so much the targeting of vulnerable groups that renders this CSR a market-correcting one in our frame but rather: a) the rationale being fairness, b) the identification of child poverty as a matter that needs addressing, and c) the general focus on welfare reform and better services (which involve greater state engagement)’. But this misses the central point: ‘a fair tax-benefit system with clearer work incentives and support services’, with the logic of all associated reforms stemming from the imperative to ‘make work pay’. These measures were not ‘market-correcting’ but rather ‘market-perfecting’. In general, then, their reading of the side-lining and subordination of ‘social’ policy is on the right lines, but does not go far enough.
Similarly, Dawson (2018: 192) suggests that EU social policy ‘is at an uneasy fork in the road’: its coordination ‘seems to have entered a blind alley, without easy escape routes’. His distinction between conditioning the market (aiming at a purely social set of goals) or facilitating market integration (aiming to reconcile integration’s
social and economic objectives) excludes a third possibility – making ‘social’ policy the principal means by which the employability and competitiveness agenda is advanced, even though he is well aware of it, citing the 2016 Annual Growth Survey as follows (p. 201):
‘More effective social protection systems are needed to confront poverty and social inclusion, while preserving sustainable public finances and incentives to work. Any such development will have to continue to ensure that the design of in-work benefits, unemployment benefit and minimum income schemes constitutes an incentive to enter the job market.’
And when he cites the Social Protection Committee in the same year as advocating a degree of flexibility in the development of pensions policy, beyond (upward) ‘adjustments to the statutory pension age’ (p. 205), we find it suggesting that
‘other tools (such as restricting access to early retirement pathways, extending contributory periods, including a life expectancy factor in the benefit calculation formula and/or stepping up efforts in workplaces and labour markets to enable women and men to work longer) also represent valid policy options for increasing the effective retirement age and for adapting pension systems to the changing demographic and economic conditions.’
Dawson makes nothing of the specific content here, and despite the fact that in 2017 the Committee began its assessment of the record of achievement in the previous year with the statement that ‘social policy should be seen as an investment and a productive factor’, he misinterprets its recognition that ‘the recommendations in relation to pension policy, in contrast to previous years, are less prescriptive and leave the necessary policy space for Member States to use the appropriate policy levers’ (p. 206), entirely missing its rich irony. While he can see that social policy had become a matter of making individuals ‘fit for the market’ (207), he cannot quite absorb its full implications, any more than he can imagine a ‘Pillar of Social Rights’ that would in fact be a constitution for global competitiveness. By this point, though, the game was over: ‘social protection’ had been ruthlessly realigned with the perceived requirements for globally competitive labour markets, and the ‘Social Protection’ Committee had become a knowing and active agent in intensifying the politics of competitiveness.
This brings us to Cavaghan and Elomäki, who argue that proponents of ‘neoliberal’ policies are misled by an ’epistemological blind spot’ that leads them to see policies focused on social reproduction as antithetical, whereas they provide the essential underpinning that efficient market-oriented policies require. At first sight, their argument is contradictory, as they wish both to reject the distinction between the social and the economic in favour of a contrast between ‘production’ and ‘social reproduction’, and to insist that policies relating to social reproduction should be viewed as ‘economic’ (‘a foundational economic input’) rather than ‘social’. More worryingly, they risk encouraging a focus on those aspects of social reproduction that can be shown to be ‘foundational economic inputs’, to the detriment of everything else associated with it. The risk is all the greater if, as I believe, EU policy makers don’t have a blind spot at all, but on the contrary, are knowingly set on reshaping activities around social reproduction so that they make the most efficient contribution to the politics of global competitiveness, at the lowest possible cost. The minute you argue that an aspect of ‘social reproduction’ should be protected because of the contribution it makes, short- or long-term, to competitiveness, you are offering up social reproduction as a servant to capitalist accumulation, and delivering it to the logic of the European Semester. This cannot be the authors’ intention.
So, Cavaghan and Elomäki may ‘begin from the assumption that the goal of economic policy should be maximum human welfare’ (5), and I can readily agree. Equally, they may insist that ‘growth and productivity are dependent upon a well-functioning reproductive economy that meets collective human needs for care, nourishment and community’ (6), and that the reproductive economy includes ‘unpaid care, alongside all monetized activities, public or private, that contribute to the maintenance of life (for example care services, welfare benefits, primary education), distinguishing between unpaid and monetized instances of it (7), and so indeed it should be. But the proponents of the politics of global competitiveness don’t think like this. They want to squeeze the maximum amount of productive paid work from the largest possible proportion of the population, and it is no coincidence that ‘stay-at-home mothers’ were a particular target, among others, of the EU-led initiative on joblessness and under-employment. The consequences of squeezing the socially reproductive sector in this way are devastating for communities and for human welfare, but policy-makers clearly don’t see them as detrimental to capital accumulation, and they can point to rising numbers of women in full time as well as part time work, ‘voluntary’ decisions to forego parenthood or delay the birth of the first child well into one’s thirties, rapidly changing family structures in which the ‘nuclear family’ with dependent children is very much the minority, the headlong commodification of all kinds of daily provision, and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of the ‘racialized and migrant women’ on whom the hardest burdens fall as evidence that they have no need to worry for the foreseeable future (Cammack, 2020).
When Cavaghan and Elomäki summarise, on the basis of their detailed review of Annual Growth Surveys, that ‘the AGSs’ commitment to social investment extends only to social reproductive services that provide returns in terms of labour supply and human capital’ (9-10), they are right. But this is not evidence of an epistemological blind spot, but of an uncompromising commitment to the logic of capital, or the politics of global competitiveness. And when they quote the 2013 AGS as saying of the ‘profound restructuring of our economies … currently taking place’ that ‘[t]his process is disruptive … and socially difficult – but it is necessary to lay the foundations for future growth and competitiveness that will be smart, sustainable and inclusive’ (11), the same point applies.
References
Cammack, Paul (2020), ‘Marx on Social Reproduction’, Historical Materialism, 28, 2, 76-106.
Cavaghan, Rosalind and Elomäki, Anna (2021), ‘Dead Ends and Blind Spots in the European Semester: The Epistemological Foundation of the Crisis in Social Reproduction’, Journal of Common Market Studies, online first.
Copeland, Paul, and Mary Daly (2018) ‘The European Semester and EU Social Policy’. Journal of Common Market Studies, 56, 5, 1001–18.
Crespy, Amandine, and George Menz (2015) ‘Commission Entrepreneurship and the Debasing of Social Europe Before and After the Eurocrisis,’ Journal of Common Market Studies, 53, 4, 753–768.
Crespy, Amandine and Vanheuverzwijn, P. (2019) ‘What Brussels Means by Structural Reforms: Empty Signifier or Constructive Ambiguity?’, Comparative European Politics, 17, 1, 92–111.
Dawson, Mark (2018) ‘New Governance and the Displacement of Social Europe: The Case of the European Semester’, European Constitutional Law Review, 14, 191–209.
Zeitlin, John and Bart Vanhercke (2018) ‘Socializing the European Semester: EU Social and Economic Policy Co-ordination in Crisis and Beyond’, Journal of European Public Policy, 25, 2, 149–74.