Overlapping and Evolving European Discourses on Market Liberalization

British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 2014

This introduction to the special section on European liberal discourses discusses three themes covered by all contributions: (i) the co-existence of several market liberal discourses in the European public sphere; (ii) interactions among these various discourses; (iii) and discursive changes resulting from these interactions.

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2014

Leading scholars in discourse analysis and European foreign policy join force in this book, marking a real breakthrough in the literature. Not only do they offer original perspectives on European foreign policy, but they bring together various theories on foreign policy discourses that remain too often isolated from each other. This theoretical diversity is clearly reflected in the book’s four-pronged structure: Part I - Post-structuralist Approaches (with contributions from Thomas Diez, Henrik Larsen and Beste Isleyne). Part II - Constructivist Approaches (with contributions from Knud Erik Jørgensen, Jan Orbie, Ferdi de Ville, Esther Barbé, Anna Herranz-Surrallés and Michal Natorski) Part III - Critical Discourse Analytical Approaches (with contributions from Senem Aydin-Düzgit, Amelie Kutter, Ruth Wodak, Salomi Boukala, and Caterina Carta. Part IV- Discoursive Institutionalist Approaches (with contributions from Ben Rosamond, Antoine Rayroux, and Vivien A. Schmidt).

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The EU’s sovereign debt crisis is not just economic; it is also political, resulting from the failure of EU leaders to offer solutions that calm the markets and convince the people. These failures stem from problems with EU leaders’ ideas about how to solve the crisis as well as their communication about them. That communication encompasses not just EU leaders talking to one another in negotiations of crisis solutions but also speaking to ‘the markets’ and to ‘the people’ about those solutions, all of which may interact in perverse ways. This article uses the analytic framework of ‘discursive institutionalism’ to consider the different forms, types, levels, rates and mechanisms of change in ideas followed by the EU leaders’ discursive interactions in the ‘coordinative’ discourse and their ‘communicative discourse’ to the global markets and European publics. It uses a range of country cases, but in particular Germany and France, in illustration.

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The crisis starting in 2008 has not led to the demise but to the reinforcement of neoliberalism, not least within the European Union (EU). We argue that this can also be observed in the EU’s external trade policy, where the European Commission’s discourse has continued to legitimize neoliberal trade through subtle re-articulations of the relationship between free trade and the crisis. In this respect four stages can be discerned: defensive, offensive-desirable, offensive-necessary and necessary-but-not-sufficient. These subtle adaptations are articulated as coherent with the internal Eurozone crisis, although we show that their assumptions can be challenged. Theoretically, we engage in a critical analysis of the Commission’s trade discourse in the context of the crisis. Empirically, we focus on the different EU Trade Commissioners’ discourses between 2008–2012. The article shows how subtly adapting discourse to a fluctuating context can effectively limit change and legitimize continuity.

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The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 2014

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This special issue aims to take the first step towards an inter-paradigmatic debate in the study of European Union trade politics.

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The aim of this paper is to assess to what extent the European Semester, which is the EU framework for the coordination of national economic, fiscal and social policies, accounts for a change in the ideas promoted throughout the crisis. For doing this, we seek to tease out the meaning and substantial policy content entailed by the notion of ‘structural reforms’, a notion which has become ubiquitous yet barely explained or defined. Besides a brief reference to the genealogy of the notion of structural reforms and interviews, the bulk of our analysis relies on the content analysis of the key documents produced in the framework of the European Semester, including the Country Specific Recommendations made to the Member States. Our data supports three sets of findings. 1/ the notion of structural reforms has been vague and malleable enough to accommodate a certain degree of ideational change with a clear shift from fiscal consolidation to investment in 2014-2015. 2/ At the same time, there is obvious continuity at the level of more specific policy recopies and instruments. While the notion of structural reforms has fuzzy contours, it also has hard core inherited from its neoliberal origins. This hard core focuses on labour market reforms, the liberalization and deregulation of product and services markets, and the reform of public administration. 3/ With regard to social policy in particular, we detect an ongoing conflict between social retrenchment and social investment with the latter gaining ground in the discourse of the EU institutions. All in all, we conclude that the EU is trapped in a destructive – rather than constructive – ambiguity. Conflicting socioeconomic strategies crystalize on which type of structural reforms should be implemented and when or, in other words, whether austerity and investment can be pursued at the same time.

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Comparative European Politics, 2015

How to make sense of a popular vote is a question raised once again by the prospect of a Brexit referendum. To date the French rejection of the European Union constitutional treaty's ratification has been one of the most consequential electoral statements in the history of European integration. Still, what its actual message was continues to puzzle analysts. What were the French telling us? The article approaches this question of from the angle of the discursive processes of meaning making in the public sphere, through arguments, narratives and images. Complementing available explanatory accounts based on survey date or quantitative textual analysis, it presents a non-quantitative interpretive discourse analysis of political ideas providing structures of meaning in the debate around the treaty, as it was reflected in the press. The focus is on discursive and narrative techniques of meaning making and knowledge production. These are situated against embedding webs of beliefs, languages, and traditions. The reading offered presents the debate as structured (i) by the motif of an open-ended search for a better Europe, rather than an outright rejection of the integration project (ii) by a deep opposition between 'social Europe' and a world where political agency over market forces is lost, and (iii) by an overarching discourse about reclaiming this agency, popular sovereignty, and asserting the will to influence Europe's political future.

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