Since the outburst of the European debt crisis in 2009, both EU institutions and the national governments of its member states have been tussling with the increasingly incompatible requirements of re-gaining market credibility and maintaining popular legitimacy. This incompatibility arose from the fact that while voters tend to punish governments that implement fiscal adjustments, especially if these are expenditure-based, the so-called ‘markets’ tend to react more favourably both to crisis management strategies based on fiscal consolidations , as opposed to neoKeynesian stimulus, as well as to fiscal adjustments based on spending cuts rather than on increasing taxes. Consequently, strict fiscal consolidations are usually hard to apply in democratic systems, since there are to be limits to how long voters endure their consequences if governments want to remain in office.
This paper therefore studies how European political elites have managed to bridge the conflicting expectations of both the people and the markets in the handling of the post-2010 Eurozone crisis. The thesis of the paper is that this policy-making process was undertaken without any search for popular consensus, let alone developing a convincing political narrative. In contrast, European political elites relied on depoliticisation as the main governing strategy, understanding by depoliticisation “the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making” (Burnham 2001). Through the implementation of depoliticised forms of fiscal governance, political elites in the EU have displaced political responsibilities for economic issues and limited the involvement of the wider public in EU institutional reforms, dealing with less frictions the trade-offs inherent in fiscal consolidation strategies. As a result, the notion that budgets should be a matter for democratic debate and evaluation is a principle that has been steadily undermined for some years in the EU.
The article develops an analytical framework for studying depoliticising policy strategies, and, in the light of it, unpacks and analyses the 2010-2015 EU’s economic governance reform process. The article investigates how the institutional reforms developed in response to the emergence of the Eurozone debt crisis have transformed fiscal governance within the EMU, trying to answer the following questions: to what extent is the European post-crisis fiscal surveillance regime more intrusive in shaping national fiscal policies in an austerity direction, and which consequences has such a regime had on the depoliticisation of national structures of macro-economic government within the Eurozone. Thus, while providing an insight into shifts in EU modes of governance, the article also focuses on the descending stage (implementation) of Europeanisation, analytically taking a rather ‘top-down’ perspective on Europeanisation that emphasizes how EU adjustment pressures trigger reforms in member states. To the extent that the aim of the article is to comprehend how the Europeanisation-cum-depoliticisation of fiscal policy within the EU has been possible, the second part of the article takes Spain as case study in order to analyse the national effects of the initiatives deployed by EU institutions with such an aim, as well as to assess the actual degree of depoliticisation triggered by them.
