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One decade after the collapse of Lehman Brothers heralded the economic and financial crisis that would keep the world in suspense and provide the initial spark for a range of processes of economic restructuring, the project of European integration finds itself confronted with a variety of problems that impede the realization of policy cohesion on the European level. In this introductory chapter, the editors define a transdisciplinary framework for analysing the current crisis in its multidimensionality and present the different political, socioeconomic, and economic approaches employed therein. Combining the neo-Gramscian concept of hegemony with a heterodox economic approach, the chapter focuses on questions of policy coherence, democratic accountability and economic restructuring. The chapter provides an overview of the fault lines in European integration and retraces how areas of economic and democratic governance, financialization and militarization, the rise of the extreme right, as well as social exclusion, welfare and migration are facets of this process.

Since the onset of the global financial crisis a decade ago, social policy reforms have become increasingly prominent in EU governance and policy debate. The severe decline in annual growth rates of social expenditures in EU-28 indicates a clear retrenchment bias in implementing respective reforms after 2008. Whereas the increasing salience of the seemingly necessity of austerity policies and structural reforms is widely acknowledged, the causes and consequences of these developments remain fiercely contested. While some see the EU as a catalyzer of the debasing of national welfare states, mainly driven by the imperative of fiscal discipline, others stress the broad scope of action left to national decision makers. Many member states have undertaken more or less far-reaching social and employment policy reforms, which they have often sought to justify by reference to EU requirements and recommendations. The article seeks to identify and to discuss specific trajectories and causalities explaining the retrenchment and deregulation bias, which goes along with the post-crisis architecture of fiscal and macroeconomic policy coordination, including Economic Adjustment Programs and Memoranda of Understandings (MoUs) imposed on fiscally distressed countries. Therefore, an econometric analysis provides an examination of the impact of financial assistance programs (ESM/EFSF) and/or of the Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) on countries’ social expenditure rates for the period 2008 to 2013. In addition, the correlation between the ideological base of parties in government and the social expenditure ratios is tested.