From austerity to new economic governance: comments to Vincenzo Maccarrone Roland Erne et al, Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 Emergency

The economic governance regime of the European Union has undergone significant changes since the onslaught of the sovereign debt crises. What has been widely interpreted as a move towards austerity to reduce high levels of debt has been analysed by Erne et al as new economic governance which overwrites previous governance regimes. The rich empirical findings provided by Erne et al strongly support this statement. However, the underlying theoretical model is not convincing as it sees the economic governance as a purely top-down approach. It neglects the interplay between the Council, where national governments express national policy preferences, and the Commission, which translates policy compromises of the Council and the Parliament into technocratic policy prescriptions. The new economic governance is not the sole child of the Commission but the product of the interplay between two levels of the EU game.