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Die Globalisierung erschwert die Bereitstellung öffentlicher Güter innerhalb nationaler Grenzen. Ein System der politischen Zusammenarbeit könnte aber eine mögliche Unterversorgung mit öffentlichen Gütern verhindern. Wie wird in der Europäischen Union die Wirtschaftspolitik einzelner Länder koordiniert? Welche Koordinierungsmethoden kommen zu den besten Ergebnissen?

Recent years have seen a distinctive transformation in EU economic governance, including the introduction of a regime of oversight and recommendation as well as the establishment of new policymaking, oversight and expert institutions at both the European and member state levels. These changes raise questions about legal and political accountability, and about the current state of integration. Debates over the political nature of contemporary economic governance have, thus far, ignored the role that the politics of gender may be playing in constructing and legitimising this regime. While much research has documented the gendered impacts of this regime, there remains a gap in the literature concerning how gender influences the regime itself. This article addresses this gap by exploring two ways in which gender politics have shaped and legitimised the new regime. First, it explores the gendered nature of economic expertise within EU economic governance. Secondly, it explores the framing of the economic crisis, and show how the narratives of the crisis helped to create this gendered regime. The article explores the gendered nature of the process of seeking legitimacy in economic policy, and so the analysis helps to deepen the understanding of the politics behind economic policy more broadly. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

This paper argues that the European Union has gone farther than any other country or institution in internalizing the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. Embedding neo-liberal principles in the treaties defining its governance, the EU has enshrined a peculiar doctrine within its constitution. We further argue that this "Berlin-Washinghton Consensus" has serious empirical and theoretical flaws, as its reliance on Pareto optimality leads to neglect the crucial links between current and potential growth. We show by means of a simple model that the call for structural reforms as an engine for growth may be controversial, once current and potential output are related. We claim that adherence to the Consensus may go a long way in explaining the poor growth performance of the European economy in the past two decades, because of the constraints that it imposed on fiscal and monetary policies. The same constraints have deepened the eurozone crisis that started in 2007, putting unwarranted emphasis on austerity and reform. Challenging the Consensus becomes a precondition for avoiding the implosion of the euro, and recovering growth.

This paper argues that the European Union has gone farther than any other country or institution in internalizing the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus. Embedding neo-liberal principles in the treaties defining its governance, the EU has enshrined a peculiar doctrine within its constitution. We further argue that this "Berlin-Washinghton Consensus" has serious empirical and theoretical flaws, as its reliance on Pareto optimality leads to neglect the crucial links between current and potential growth. We show by means of a simple model that the call for structural reforms as an engine for growth may be controversial, once current and potential output are related. We claim that adherence to the Consensus may go a long way in explaining the poor growth performance of the European economy in the past two decades, because of the constraints that it imposed on fiscal and monetary policies. The same constraints have deepened the eurozone crisis that started in 2007, putting unwarranted emphasis on austerity and reform. Challenging the Consensus becomes a precondition for avoiding the implosion of the euro, and recovering growth.

In 2016, JCMS's special issue 'Another Theory is Possible' argued that both EU Studies and the EU find themselves in need of a re-invigorated, poly-phonic debate which questions the socio-economic power structures and narratives of exclusion potentially embedded in all politics (Manners and Whitman, 2016). In this contribution focusing on the EU's economic policy, we take up this challenge applying an intersectional lens to review the positive narrative of growth and recovery that the European Commission, amongst others, deployed in 2017. Our analysis shows how EU economic policy plays a key role in establishing gendered and racialised hierarchies in the EU. Additionally, this reveals the gendered and racialised dynamics at the heart of European integration itself. We demonstrate the urgent need for EU studies to take such dynamics seriously in seeking to understand the European Union of 2017 and beyond. Taking an intersectional, perspective, we problematise who the audience for this positive narrative is and whose economic well-being is understood to 'count'. As such, we examine the gender constitutive effects of the EU as an economic actor. We explore how European integration is progressing through the establishment of a common economic space (Hoskyns 2008, 108) built through the pursuit of gender-blind and gender-biased economic goals promoted by the EU. This is an EU which ignores women as economic citizens and economic actors. In building this critique of the narratives of the EU's economic 'success' or of 'the end of the crisis', we draw on two existing bodies of work: existing critical political economic approaches to EU Integration which have sought to understand the full implications of the shifts in the EU's economic governance structures, the flexibility and political opportunism of the EU's economic narrative (Rosamond, 2002; Ryner, 2015; Schmidt, 2016), and Feminist Political Economy critiques which have uncovered 'strategic silences' in 'mainstream' approaches to macro-economic policy (Picchio, 2015; Schuberth and Young, 2011). These perspectives are united by the way that they shed light on how the EU is (re-) shaping the contours and limits of political arena. As the EU's institutions seek to portray a break with the crisis and a return to normality, we interrogate this narrative of exiting crisis, arguing that it serves to entrench and continue economic priorities and assumptions established in the heat of the crisis. The narrow economic interests of finance and global markets that were prioritised during the crisis remain dominant in this 'post-crisis' moment, presented as universal. The pursuit of these interests does not serve those most impacted by the crisis itself: women and marginalised groups.

The purpose of this note is to present economic governance in the European Union, its 2017 cycle and its main tools for the coordination of economic and fiscal policies of the 28 member states through a list of parallel procedures and processes.