More Effective, Less Desirable? the European Employment Strategy Under Europe 2020

This article concerns itself with the debate surrounding the post-2010 relationship between the EU’s economic governance and the European Employment Strategy (EES). Since the beginning of the Eurozone crisis the EU has strengthened its economic governance to prioritise financial and fiscal discipline, with the latter having emerged as the EU’s number one priority. This paper tests the assumption of a strengthened link between the EU’s economic governance and the EES. It designs a quantitative framework to analyse policy outcomes and applies it to ten EU member states between 2011-2015. The framework focuses on the specific policy measures enacted at Member State level and their ideological underpinnings in response to the EES. After presenting the results, the paper subsequently analyses the content of the Country Specific Recommendations and the level of follow-up within each of the ten member states. The paper finds that the reforms to EU economic governance provide an ideological straightjacket in which there are limited funds available at the Member State level to address unemployment. The result is that policy outcomes correspond to the cost-efficient paradigm of a liberalisation of employment policy and tougher unemployment benefit conditionality. This suggests that the causal link between EU economic governance and the EES has both strengthened and narrowed.  The post-2010 ideological focus of EU employment policy is one that primarily serves economic goals, rather than aiming to improve the situation of workers. Hence it signifies a relapse to a dispersed pre-Maastricht Europe of an economic union without a social dimension.