Introduction: the European Semester as a new architecture of EU socioeconomic governance in theory and practice

Amy Verdun,Jonathan Zeitlin

doi:10.1080/13501763.2017.1363807

Amy Verdun, Jonathan Zeitlin

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2017.1363807

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Abstract

ABSTRACTThe ‘European Semester’, a new framework for policy co-ordination across European Union (EU) member states, represents a major step in EU governance. Created in 2010 in the wake of the financial and sovereign debt crises and revamped in 2015, it was intended to provide a new socioeconomic governance architecture to co-ordinate national policies without transferring full sovereignty to the EU level. This introduction offers a brief overview and assessment of the European Semester, examining its implications along three critical axes, running respectively between the economic and the social, the supranational and the intergovernmental, and the technocratic and democratic poles of EU governance. We introduce and briefly summarize the seven other contributions that make up this collection. Our conclusions are that the European Semester challenges established theoretical understandings of EU governance, as it is a prime example of the complexity that supersedes simple polar oppositions.

Highlights

The ‘European Semester’ is a new governance architecture for socioeconomic policy co-ordination in the European Union (EU)
Our conclusions are that the European Semester challenges established theoretical understandings of EU governance, as it is a prime example of the complexity that supersedes simple polar oppositions
One key theme in the early literature was how to characterize the balance within the Semester between ‘hard’, rules-based elements derived from the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and ‘softer’, more deliberative forms of policy co-ordination associated with the OMC, with authors such as Armstrong (2013) and Bekker (2013) emphasizing the hybrid character of the emerging governance architecture

Summary

Introduction

The ‘European Semester’ (hereafter ‘Semester’) is a new governance architecture for socioeconomic policy co-ordination in the European Union (EU). The Semester brings together within a single policy co-ordination cycle a variety of EU governance instruments with different legal bases, from the SGP, MIP and Fiscal Compact to the Europe 2020 Strategy and the Integrated Economic and Employment Policy Guidelines In this cycle, the Commission, the Council of the EU (hereafter: Council) and the European Council set priorities for the Union; review national performance, budgets and reform programmes; and issue Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs), backed up in some cases by possible financial sanctions. The contributions adopt different methodological and data-gathering approaches, from original surveys (Hallerberg et al.) to semi-structured interviews with key policy actors and content analysis of primary documents (at both EU and national levels) Taken together, they offer an authoritative state-of-the-art analysis of the Semester’s implications for the evolution of EU socioeconomic governance since the crisis. We review the literature on the Semester, introduce the individual contributions, and highlight the collection’s most salient findings

Literature review

Our contribution

Conclusion

Notes on contributors