European Semester

This paper analyzes the evolution of EU governance since the financial and eurozone crisis from an experimentalist perspective. It argues that EU governance in many key policy domains continues to take the form of an experimentalist decision-making architecture, based on a recursive process of framework goal-setting and revision through comparative review of implementation experience in diverse local contexts, which is well adapted to the Union's turbulent and polyarchic environment. The first part of the paper presents a synoptic theoretical account of the characteristics of experimentalist governance, and summarises the empirical evidence on its incidence and operation within the EU before the crisis. The second part of the paper examines two 'hard cases' from an experimentalist perspective, namely, financial regulation and the European Semester of socioeconomic policy coordination. The paper concludes that both cases illustrate the limits of centralised hierarchical governance under the diverse and polyarchic conditions of the EU, together with the continuing attraction of experimentalist approaches for tackling complex, uncertain problems like financial regulation and reform of national employment and welfare systems.

Energy transition policies and environmental fiscal reforms (EFR) in particular are necessary from an environmental perspective but also from a social one. In the long run, EFR help reduce fuel poverty. Included in wider tax shifts, eco-tax reforms can also contribute to employment creation and/or contribute to pension system financing during demographic transitions.
However, in the short run, eco-taxes can have strong negative impacts on low income households and on vulnerable businesses. A variety of compensation mechanisms can be used to counter such effects – and have been used successfully in many countries. Some mechanisms (like subsidies for technological change) stand out as more effective than others (like tax rebates).

In her chapter, Ramona Coman scrutinizes the most recent evolutions of EU’s modes of governance since the entry into force of the Maastricht Treaty. The focus of her study lies on the examination of the resilience of EU’s modes of governance in the light of new conceptualizations in EU studies: the new intergovernmentalism and the new supranationalism. While the first sections looks at the intergovernmental method, the second section deals with the community method and the last one with the open method of coordination (OMC) and the European Semester, which is the instrument designed at the onset of the Eurozone crisis for the coordination of macro-economic policies. The contribution shows that EU policy-making witnessed several transformations since the 1990s and that the intensity of change has been fuelled by the Eurozone crisis, which put the decision-making process under considerable strain. In 2010, when it was unclear how to respond appropriately to the problems of the Eurozone both in terms of process and in terms of solutions, Coman argues, EU institutional actors reacted rapidly to reassure the markets and to save the euro. The decisions taken from 2010 to 2012 altered prevailing modes of governance as the crisis forced the EU to adjust the decision-making process. At the onset of the Eurozone crisis the intergovernmental methods prevailed; as soon as the crisis entered in its “slow-burning phase,” supranational institutions and actors regained power and visibility in the decision-making process. The overarching aim of Coman’s contribution is to capture incremental changes in the power relations between the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council and the European Council and to show how they have remodelled pre-existing modes of governance. The chapter illustrates the “adaptability and resilience” of the EU policy-making in face of new challenges (cf. Pollack, Wallace and Young 2010: 482; Schmidt and Thatcher 2013), that is the ability of EU institutions to adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions. In doing so, it scrutinizes institutional empowerment in EU decision-making both de iure and de facto. On the one hand, EU institutional actors are granted new attributions in the formulation, decision-making and implementation of EU public policies and, on the other, they perform new functions through their dynamic interactions.

Since its inception in 2010, the European Semester has undergone a series of institutional clarifications and procedural adjustments aimed at strengthening its legitimacy. Over its first 5 iterations it has significantly reshaped the roles, attributions and relations between the EU’s institutions, thus echoing several scholars’ contention that the old dynamics of integration have been replaced by new ones: the new supranationalism, the new intergovernmentalism and the new parliamentarism. Depending on the theoretical perspective embraced existing schools of thought draw these changes within the institutional dynamics of the EU in contrasting colors. Where new intergovernmentalists see new modes of governance such as the Semester attest to an increase in power of the Member States, the promoters of the new supranationalism observe a continued empowerment of supranational institutions, whereas new parliamentarism emphasize the mounting importance of parliamentary prerogatives. The aim of this article is to go beyond such stark dichotomies by arguing in favor of a dynamic process of hybridization. Put differently, the article challenges the view that the new modes of governance born from the Eurozone crisis have empowered one institution to the detriment of the others. We rather argue that the European Semester combines elements of the longer-term evolutions identified by these three schools, thus giving rise to a new institutional equilibrium.

Social dialogue between government, employers’ and workers’ organizations is a powerful tool for correcting labour market imbalances and promoting jobs-rich economic recovery. During and since the economic and financial crisis which started in 2008, national social dialogue institutions in countries of the European Union (EU) have been tested but, in many cases, have demonstrated their potential to innovate and contribute to a return to positive growth. This book brings together country case studies from eleven EU Member States, which document emerging trends in national social dialogue, focusing on developments since 2013. The authors shed light on the many factors that have influenced recent social dialogue and industrial relations developments, including the national economic and political context, the effectiveness of bipartite and tripartite institutions, and the European Semester. An introductory comparative overview chapter analyses overall trends and specific good practices ...

Over-politicization co-exists in the Croatian public administration with legalism, formalism and red tape. Low reform, innovation and initiative capacities are among the results of such an administrative model. Croatia has a relatively big and strong but inefficient public administration. Internal bureaucratic resistance to modernization is observable. Foreign actors play a moderate role in administrative reform. Th e European Union has exerted the strongest infl uence on modernization on the basis of conditionality policy, insistence on the administrative capacity building, and the European Semester
procedure. E-government policy, transparency, and strategic planning are the reform areas with the above-average reform results.
Keywords: public administration reform – Croatia; modernization; Europeanization; resilient bureaucracy; reform outcomes; European Semester.

Is there ever an ideal time to publish a volume on the contemporary state of law and politics in the European Union (EU)? The entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon (2009), having 'rescued' parts of the Draft Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe, was supposed to herald a new chapter in European integration, with greater institutional stability and coherence, a consolidation of its achievements and a focus on furthering integration in areas where only limited steps had been taken. However, despite the advanced stage of European integration, the decade since Lisbon has been marked by a series of crises. Whilst the EU is certainly used to facing serious crises, dealing with them and often emerging with renewed goals and impetus, many of the recent challenges are unprecedented and go to the heart of what the EU is-and stands for. The economic and financial crises; questions over the future of the euro; the lack of collective responses to migration and regional instability; democratic and rule of law backsliding in some Member States; the UK referendum on leaving the EU and the complexities of Brexit negotiations, and more recently the challenges of coordinating the fight against the coronavirus pandemia, have dominated the debates. All bring to the fore the complex relationship between law and politics in the EU, and revive or renew discussions about the role of law and legal actors in European integration. Law has always played a central role in European integration. 1 Whilst new forms of integration take shape, and modes of governance have diversified, law continues to play a primordial, yet evolving, role in EU integration and governance in general, and in addressing these multiple challenges. EU law, in any case, does not operate in a political and social vacuum. It is influenced by multiple societal forces and impacts back on them in a continually iterative process. This Research Handbook introduces and considers contemporary academic perspectives on the politics of EU law. Its object of study is the law of the EU, in its various forms and shapes, its complex and multifaceted institutional framework and system of governance, the broad spectrum of policies it covers, and its relationship with emerging forms of global law. The ongoing challenges facing the EU have thrown a different light on European integration and governance, and invited (or even forced) scholars to revisit some assumptions about the dynamics, nature and purpose 1

EAPN is a network dedicated to the fight against poverty. Our aim is to work together to achieve a reduction of poverty, through improvements in antipoverty policy and practice at national and EU level. Monitoring trends on poverty is part of this process, holding governments to account, as well as raising awareness to the general public about the realities on the ground in order to build pressure for change. Currently, EAPN is engaging in the European Semester, in order to try to get delivery on the poverty reduction, employment and education targets of Europe 2020 through dialogue processes. This involves monitoring policy proposals from the European Commission and Member States, and trying to influence the policy recommendations by drawing attention to trends and realities on the ground. This has been an important part of our Work Programme to the Commission in this period, and for our funding. However, members have increasingly raised concerns about the amount of work required for this engagement/monitoring process, and policy impact, particularly in countries with a weak commitment to meaningful stakeholder involvement. The proposal gives priority to members’ own assessment of what is happening to poverty in their country, which can serve as an awareness-raising and advocacy instrument at national level, as well as form the basis of effective inputs to the EU level, particularly to the European Semester/Europe 2020 process.

This EAPN Poverty Watch report is a compilation of key data on Poverty, Vulnerability and Exclusion in Spain.
Objectives:
1) To monitor key trends and policy on poverty and social exclusion in Europe.
2) To raise awareness about priority issues and impact/reality for people experiencing poverty
3) To propose concrete recommendations backed by example and evidence.
Target audience:
1) Stakeholders and general public at national level.
2) National and EU decision-makers

It is without a doubt that, whatever the opinion may be on the dominant
economic theories in Europe, the dynamics of the Single Market
and of Economic Governance have affected the “European Social
Model”, with implications on national social rights. This was all the
more evident at the heart of the EMU, where, as well as the single currency,
there is a reinforced system of sanctions and coordination of
economic and budgetary policies. Based on this scenario, the “dialogue
between Courts”, which has indeed done a lot for the multilevel protection
of rights, has had little or no success, having not – up to now –
managed to come up with suitable and efficient instruments of “containment”
of the priority economic and financial objectives and of the
social impact of the related stringent measures. The national Constitutional
Courts thus found themselves alone, in the difficult position of
having to “balance” economic figures and fundamental social rights. Finally,
however, something appears to be moving at the heart of the
EMU, where the «social fairness» of Economic Governance processes
and a «European pillar of social rights» are becoming the mainstreams
of a new phase of technical and political evolution. The target, pursued
by recent initiatives of the Commission, aims beyond the OMC, placing
the social dimension at the heart of Economic Governance, thus rebalancing
its “poor” position in relation to the prevalent “economics”
priorities.

This chapter examines this process of coordination to show how EU institutions adopt the set of Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) that are issued annually by the Commission, endorsed by the European Council and approved by the Council in the framework of the European Semester. Drawing on interviews, it demonstrates that the European Semester is a process of coordination where constrains are deliberated and negotiated at three intertwined levels: in expert committees, where national experts exchange views and policy ideas with the Commission, in bilateral meetings between Member States and the Commission where Member States express their political will or unwillingness to implement reforms and seek to persuade the Commission to take into account their preferences and to consider their domestic situation, and, ultimately, in the Council, when the vote is used as a last resort mechanism to decide on issues unsolved by national experts. As the Council has to ‘comply or explain’ its position, at each stage Member States build coalitions to vote against the Commission’s proposals. Thus, the three levels of coordination are intertwined. At each stage, political and administrative actors seek to shape the degree of constraint by convincing their peers and the Commission about the validity of their claims in an attempt to avoid unpopular recommendations being implemented at the domestic level. The chapter concludes that although the coordination of policies has been improved in terms of process over time and has gained the support of all the actors involved (independently on their views on the policies at stake), it still lacks politicization, transparency and publicity, as most of these debates which are of great importance for European citizens take place behind closed doors, through negotiations and deliberations between representatives of the Commission, national experts and Member States’ representatives in the Council. The European Semester is an illustration of coordination of policies through executive politics.

Since the sovereign debt crisis, Economic governance for Euro area members has been transformed. This articles describes critically these evolutions.
La gouvernance s’est imposée comme une notion permettant d’analyser l’évolution de l’Union européenne et de son fonctionnement. Depuis la crise des dettes souveraines et la réforme de UEM, elle est employée pour qualifier la coordination des politiques économiques nationales. Un tel choix peut laisser sceptique et l’article recherche à démontrer en quoi il est discutable, voire contestable. La première partie analyse les mécanismes de la gouvernance économique qui la conduisent à s’imposer aux gouvernements nationaux. Dans un premier temps, les choix des politiques économiques nationaux sont évalués par l’Union européenne sur la base de critères prédéfinis. Les réformes de la gouvernance économique ont conduit à la généralisation d’une telle technique. Dans un second temps, les choix nationaux sont soumis à l’approbation ex ante – notamment les budgets – des institutions de l’Union, sous peine d’une sanction ex post. La seconde partie s’intéresse aux caractéristiques de cette nouvelle gouvernance économique. Elle peut, tout d’abord, être qualifiée de technocratique. Elle conduit, au niveau national comme européen, à l’intervention d’experts pour juger les choix politiques des parlements et gouvernements. La multiplication des rapports et procédures rend la lisibilité d’un tel processus délicate. Or, cette apparence technique ne saurait cacher l’existence d’un véritable gouvernement économique, quasiment mécanique, conduisant à appliquer, parfois à l’aveugle et sans réelle cohérence, un dogme prédéfini. Il s’agit là du reflet de l’impossibilité d’instituer un véritable gouvernement économique de l’Union, qui risque à terme de remettre en cause les structures sociales et politiques nationales.

Rispettivamente, G. Canales (Area metropolitana di Guadalajara) e R. Hall (Senior Advisor Directorate-General for Regional & Urban Policy per la UE) nel webinar Cities facing COVID-19: Opportunities and challenges for a more sustainable future, 24/06/2020.

This chapter examines this process of coordination to show how EU institutions adopt the set of Country Specific Recommendations (CSRs) that are issued annually by the Commission, endorsed by the European Council and approved by the Council in the framework of the European Semester. Drawing on interviews, it demonstrates that the European Semester is a process of coordination where constrains are deliberated and negotiated at three intertwined levels: in expert committees, where national experts exchange views and policy ideas with the Commission, in bilateral meetings between Member States and the Commission where Member States express their political will or unwillingness to implement reforms and seek to persuade the Commission to take into account their preferences and to consider their domestic situation, and, ultimately, in the Council, when the vote is used as a last resort mechanism to decide on issues unsolved by national experts. As the Council has to ‘comply or explain’ its position, at each stage Member States build coalitions to vote against the Commission’s proposals. Thus, the three levels of coordination are intertwined. At each stage, political and administrative actors seek to shape the degree of constraint by convincing their peers and the Commission about the validity of their claims in an attempt to avoid unpopular recommendations being implemented at the domestic level. The chapter concludes that although the coordination of policies has been improved in terms of process over time and has gained the support of all the actors involved (independently on their views on the policies at stake), it still lacks politicization, transparency and publicity, as most of these debates which are of great importance for European citizens take place behind closed doors, through negotiations and deliberations between representatives of the Commission, national experts and Member States’ representatives in the Council. The European Semester is an illustration of coordination of policies through executive politics.

Over-politicization co-exists in the Croatian public administration with legalism, formalism and red tape. Low reform, innovation and initiative capacities are among the results of such an administrative model. Croatia has a relatively big and strong but inefficient public administration. Internal bureaucratic resistance to modernization is observable. Foreign actors play a moderate role in administrative reform. Th e European Union has exerted the strongest infl uence on modernization on the basis of conditionality policy, insistence on the administrative capacity building, and the European Semester procedure. E-government policy, transparency, and strategic planning are the reform areas with the above-average reform results. Keywords: public administration reform – Croatia; modernization; Europeanization; resilient bureaucracy; reform outcomes; European Semester.

Since the onset of the crisis the EU has introduced new instruments of economic governance, at the heart of which is the European semester. Scholars largely disagree on which institutional actor has come out as the winner from these reforms. This article attempts to contribute to this debate by examining how the European semester has been enforced by the Commission since 2011. The main argument is that although the decision-making process during the crisis has been broadly dominated by member states, the Commission enjoys considerable discretion over the enforcement of the European semester. This is explained by the incomplete nature of the contracts of delegation between member states and the Commission. As a case study, the article focusses on the Commission’s discretion in enforcing the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure and the reinforced Stability and Growth Pact, as well as in shaping the procedures of the semester itself. At the same time, it is shown that the Commission uses its discretion very carefully, alternating between flexibility and rigidity.

El presente trabajo trata de analizar las políticas contra la pobreza aplicadas por España en el marco de la estrategia Europa 2020. Estas políticas se han llevado a cabo mediante mecanismos de gobernanza ―en concreto, el denominado experimentalismo democrático―, cuya efectividad y legitimidad están en entredicho. Para ello se analizará, de un lado, el Semestre Europeo, que coordina estas políticas a nivel de la UE. Del otro, distintos documentos españoles que se enmarcan en este proceso y que permiten evaluar los niveles de legitimidad democrática de este mecanismo.

Since the onset of the crisis the EU has introduced new instruments of socioeconomic governance, at the heart of which is the European Semester. This paper sets out to study the formulating process of two major documents published under the European Semester, namely the Country Report and the proposals for Country Specific Recommendations. In so doing, it elaborates a circular conception of the Europeanization process in order to show how national actors resist to the European Commission and how this resistance affects in turn the ways in which the European Semester operates. It identifies three types of instruments of national resistance (informative, political and communicative) as well as three corresponding counter-reactions from the EU level.

The European Semester was introduced in 2010 as a response to the economic crisis. In the framework of the European Semester the European Commission evaluates one by one the economy of each member state, but no comparative reports are made. Scientific literature doesn’t deal expressly with the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. Following a review of the scientific literature, in this paper I analyse the economic results of six CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) between 2010-2016 based on the indicators used for the European Semester.

Indicators of government activity must be carefully designed to be relevant, credible and accountable. Frustration with reform pressures suggests that measures of policy activity are not providing accurate information. In fact, indicators of product or labour market regulation fail to measure structural reform as they focus on crosscountry comparisons rather than on progress with reform over time. I use the novel EU Semester approach recommending EU Member States to implement reforms and their annual follow-up in the National Reform Programme to develop some indicators of how reform plans are actually implemented. This indicator might be useful for checking progress with policy, but also for empirical studies testing what drives or blocks reform in different policy domains.