How the impossible became possible: evolving frames and narratives on responsibility and responsiveness from the Eurocrisis to NextGenerationEU

ABSTRACT

This paper explains how a turn in EU governance which was unthinkable only a few months prior became possible in 2020. Rather than a sudden paradigm shift brought about by the pandemic, we argue that it occurred through successive episodes of reinterpreting the rules and layering on new instruments while fostering investment and fiscal sharing on top of the pre-existing ordoliberal regime. Through a discursive institutionalist lens, the paper supports these claims by studying the frames and narratives of French, German and EU leaders during three rounds of reforms, namely the flexibilization of the European Semester (2014–2016), the adoption of the Budgetary Instrument for Convergence and Competitiveness (BICC) (2017–2019), and the adoption of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (2020–2021). The analysis shows that an increased awareness of a responsiveness imperative, going beyond national constituencies, transformed European elites’ conceptions of ‘responsible’ government thus at least momentarily closing the gap between responsibility and responsiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• European governance
• responsibility
• responsiveness
• discourse
• framing
• narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Because each corpus has a different length, the number of occurrences indicated in the tables only offer a rough substantiation of the salience of given frames and should be considered in relative rather than absolute terms.

2 The corpus includes three joint conferences with French President Macron in March 2018 and then in June 2018 when both countries issues the Meseberg declaration on EU governance.

3 Only frames whose distribution is greater than 10% of the total coded by overarching frame are included in this table. A detailed table can be found in the appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the FNRS under the incentive grant for scientific research nbr F.4508.20.

Notes on contributors

Amandine Crespy

Amandine Crespy is Professor of Political Science & European Studies at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where she is affiliated with the Cevipol and the Institut d’Etudes Européennes (IEE). She is also Visiting Professor at the College of Europe (Bruges). Her research deals with socio-economic governance and policies in the European Union with a focus on the role of ideas, discourse and conflict. She is the co-editor of Governance and Politics in the Post-Crisis European Union (2020, Cambridge University Press) and the author of Welfare Markets in Europe (Palgrave, 2016) and The European Social Question: Tackling Key Controversies (Agenda, 2022).

Tom Massart

Tom Massart is a FNRS Dotoral Research Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he is affiliated with the Cevipol. He holds a master’s degree in European Studies from the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). In his work, he analyses the 2020 agreement on the issuance of European debt, based on actors’ strategic construction of European bonds through frames. He recently published ‘The European Semester: Vehicle of integration or fragmentation?’ (Politique européenne, 2022).

Vivien Schmidt

Vivien A. Schmidt is Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration and Professor of International Relations and Political Science in the Pardee School at Boston University, where she also served as Founding Director of its Center for the Study of Europe. Her work focuses on European political economy, institutions, and democracy as well as political theory (with a special focus on the role of ideas and discourse in political analysis – ‘discursive institutionalism’). In addition to her latest book Europe’s Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone (Oxford2020), recent publications include Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (co-edited, Cambridge 2013), and Democracy in Europe (Oxford 2006; La Découverte2010 Fr. trans.) – named in 2015 by the European Parliament as one of the ‘100Books on Europe to Remember’. Recent honours and awards include decoration as Chevalier in the French Legion of Honour, the European Union Studies Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for her project on the ‘rhetoric of discontent’, a transatlantic investigation of the populist revolt.