Saturday, April 16, 2016
Concerto A (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
EU policies covering employment, working conditions, and social protection have taken a back seat to those centered on building the common market. Nevertheless, as economic divergence has become an increasing factor within the EMU, policy concerns related to budgetary probity and market elasticity are supplemented by a mounting realization of the need for adequate social inclusion and popular legitimacy. This explains the eventual inclusion of DG EMPL in the working of the European semester. Nonetheless, if Social Europe’s policy agenda has proven itself quite resilient, its policy mechanisms were thoroughly upended by the crisis. Reforms enforcing austerity and competitiveness have cast doubt over the continued relevance of Social Europe’s relatively softer governance tools. Indeed, how resilient are such modes of governance in the face of new forms of hard conditionality? A far cry from the principled Stability and Growth Pact, the standardized European Semester and Macroeconomic Imbalances Procedure revolutionize the EU’s use of conditionality in its domestic governance. On the whole, these are more akin to EU policy instruments mobilized to project its regulatory preferences beyond its borders. Through process-tracing and elite interview, the paper’s will test the hypothesis that strengthened conditionality has had little effect on the OMC’s contentious input and output legitimacy mechanisms, but that it has undermined its ‘throughput legitimacy’ by adversely affecting: (1) the openness of the inter-sectoral dialogue between European social partners; (2) the accountability of the institutional relationship between DG ECFIN and DG EMPL; and (3) the inclusiveness of the policy agenda
