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Following the pandemic, the EU has responded to the threat of a euro crisis flare-up by deactivating its fiscal framework and establishing the Recovery and Resilience Facility, drawing on joint European bonds to finance national investments. This paper seeks to explain these modifications to fiscal governance and asks whether they are an indication of European austerity making way for an alternative fiscal paradigm. Based on a neo-Gramscian approach, it discusses the policies as parts of competing political projects that are promoted or hindered by certain framework conditions. The paper undertakes a structured comparison of these framework conditions during the euro crisis and the current crisis. It finds that geoeconomic competition increases the demand for a more active fiscal policy, while political preferences and structural relations remained remarkably stable. As the current crisis is marked by high inflation, economic conditions are adverse to a fiscally expansive agenda. The findings do not suggest a lasting reorientation of European fiscal governance. Instead, the measures taken during the pandemic are interpreted as expressions of 'passive revolution' in which the EMU adapts elements of a fiscal integrative agenda to provide necessary fixes to its economic order while keeping its underlying fiscally restrictive features intact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on ECB's economic policy thinking and its internal politics of ideas, this research aims to provide two contributions to knowledge. Firstly, it seeks to enhance scholarly understanding of ideational change inside international organisations (IOs). To do so, it asks (a) how ECB's economic policy thinking has evolved since the outbreak of the euro crisis, and (b) what drives change in ECB's ideas on the best way to deepen Europe's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in its fiscal and economic realms. To answer these questions, fiscal policy, structural reforms and convergence towards resilient economic structures are used as case studies. The article argues that the interplay between changes in ECB's leadership and internal policy discussions promoted by ideational entrepreneurs played a pivotal role in enabling new ideas to emerge inside the Bank. Secondly, by interrogating ECB's ideas on the way to complete EMU, this research reflects on the future of the euro. It shares the view that the construction of cognitive authority within IOs is an ongoing political struggle over the ideas underpinning the everyday practice of global governance. By looking at the politics of ideas within the ECB, this article aims to contribute to the international political economy of EMU deepening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How should history judge the euro crisis and the way it was handled? Does it qualify as a policy fiasco in the sense that it was avoidable? Or could the crisis at least have been handled in a manner which substantially reduced its destructive impact on the economic and social welfare and politics of Europe? These questions necessitate counter-factual analysis. Nevertheless, they deserve attention. How history is interpreted impacts decisions about today and tomorrow. The article explores three discourses on economic governance: on financial stability, fiscal policy and on growth. Each discourse came with pathologies: they did not sensitize decision-makers to crucial negative consequences of the policy choices they privileged at decisive points in the sequence of boom, bust and (policy engineered) painfully slow recovery. The ECB has quietly changed its ways, but unwillingness to confront the crisis head-on as a policy fiasco can obstruct learning opportunities that are important for the EU and the Eurozone going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hard-line Euroscepticism appears to be, nowadays, a persistent phenomenon of the later stages of European integration. However, it is unclear to what extent the joint effects of economic insecurities and growing numbers of immigrants play a role in determining the people's choice to actually support hard-line Eurosceptic parties with their vote. Building upon the existing body of literature on the economic determinants of voting for anti-European parties, this study brings the analysis further by breaking down the electoral performance of strictly Eurosceptic parties for different types of elections at the regional level, accounting for within-country variations otherwise lost in national-level analysis. We build a dataset including the regionally distributed results of all electoral episodes (regional, national, European) between 2007 and 2016 in Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Italy for a total of 522 elections. Methodologically, the paper adopts panel-level econometrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a European identity is expected to influence citizens’ attitudes and behaviour towards the EU community. European identity is indeed positively related to support for EU integration, but are citizens with a stronger European identity also willing to pay a price for this identification, and to what extent? The contribution provides an answer to these questions by performing multilevel analyses on the EES 2014 data. The analyses show that citizens with a stronger European identity are more supportive of financial solidarity with member states in economic crisis. This explanation for support for solidarity is stronger than explanations provided by self-interest and economic ideological position. Citizens are thus willing to pay a price for their European identity. However, one can only expect so much from European identity as significant interaction effects show that the positive relationship between European identity and support for solidarity is mitigated by experiencing economic hardship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on how new Eurosceptic parties are received and interpreted by the media. It does so by analysing the quality press coverage of three specific cases: the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) (Italy), the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Germany) and the Team Stronach (TS) (Austria). These cases represent non-extremist Eurosceptic challengers to the political establishment, which capitalized upon the Euro Crisis and competed in national elections in 2013 for the first time. We look at their representation in the coverage, which issues they were mainly associated with, and how they were pictured overall. The results of the analysis show that the presentational style differs among the parties: a strong personalization, a strong negativity and a focus on events characterized the presentation of the M5S and the TS, while issues played a slightly greater role for the AfD. The three parties' coverage, however, converges in a generally peripheral role of issues, in an overall negative bias, and in depicting them as dangerous and irresponsible populist protest parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we examine the role of EMU-China monetary and trade relations in the divergent evolution of the extra-regional trade balance of Germany and the GIPS countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain). These deepening relations generated an asymmetric shock in the Eurozone: while Germany largely benefited from the rise of China in the global monetary and trading system, the GIPS countries have been much less adapted. Drawing on the insights of the varieties of capitalism literature, we argue that the institutional adaptability of these countries to these deepening relations has been a function of the presence of particular labor market institutions that allow manufacturing firms to maintain their competitiveness. Coordinated labor market institutions supported Germany's extra-regional trade balance performance by bestowing its manufacturing firms with comparative institutional advantages, whereas the absence of these labor market institutions in the GIPS rendered their manufacturing firms much less institutionally adjusted to deal with the competitiveness pressures associated with the rise of China. As such, EMU-China monetary and trade relations have been a contributing factor in the Eurozone debt crisis by forcing the GIPS countries to run increasing extra-regional trade deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]