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We review the initial predictions and claims regarding economic and monetary union (EMU) in Europe against the evidence of its first ten years of existence. We argue that pessimistic views on the creation of EMU have proved to be wrong. Yet EMU's success is rather puzzling, since it is based on a peculiar institutional structure not thought to lead to success. EMU has generated redistributive effects and may have increased business-cycle synchronization. Those effects have not translated into the expected decrease of legitimacy or a widespread democratic deficit of EMU. At the institutional level, EMU has coped well with an asymmetric framework, largely decoupling EMU from political union. There have been neither major spill-over effects pushing for further political integration nor conflict and disintegration. The main question for the future is whether this institutional structure will stay the same in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
The European Union (EU) – and its Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in particular – is often criticized as a predominantly market-oriented project. We analyse to what extent such claims can be substantiated by focusing on one key aspect of the EU’s post-crisis framework for economic governance: the country-specific recommendations (CSRs) that the EU has been issuing annually since 2011. Based on an original dataset, we analyse more than 1300 CSRs, which show that the EU does not push uniformly for less state intervention. Rather, the CSRs tend to suggest fiscal restraint and less protection for labour market insiders, while simultaneously promoting measures that benefit vulnerable groups in society. During the second decade of EMU, CSRs have gradually become more permissive of higher public spending and more in favour of worker protection, while the share of recommendations advocating more social protection has stagnated at a high level.
We review the initial predictions and claims regarding economic and monetary union (EMU) in Europe against the evidence of its first ten years of existence. We argue that pessimistic views on the creation of EMU have proved to be wrong. Yet EMU's success is rather puzzling, since it is based on a peculiar institutional structure not thought to lead to success. EMU has generated redistributive effects and may have increased business-cycle synchronization. Those effects have not translated into the expected decrease of legitimacy or a widespread democratic deficit of EMU. At the institutional level, EMU has coped well with an asymmetric framework, largely decoupling EMU from political union. There have been neither major spill-over effects pushing for further political integration nor conflict and disintegration. The main question for the future is whether this institutional structure will stay the same in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
In 2010 the European Semester was created to better coordinate fiscal and economic policies within Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. The Semester aims to tackle economic imbalances by giving European Union (EU) member states country-specific recommendations (CSRs) regarding their public budgets as well as their wider economic and social policies with a view to enabling better policy coordination among Euro Area member states. In this article we develop a method to assess the way in which the CSRs have been addressing coordination and offer a systematic analysis of the way they have been formulated. We offer a way to code CSRs as well as one to analyse progress evaluations. Furthermore, we seek to use our results to address one of the reoccurring questions in the literature: whether the EU is pursuing a ‘one size fits all’ approach to economic policy making in the Euro Area? The findings indicate that different types of market economies and welfare states – different ‘varieties of capitalism’ – among the Euro Area members obtain different recommendations regarding different policy areas.