Workshop: “From Bailouts to the Recovery and Resilience Facility: EU’s changing Economic Governance”

During the Eurozone crisis, five governments in economic difficulty received conditionality-based assistance from international lenders. Catherine Moury co-author of Capitalising on Constraint presented the book’s principal idea that, despite international market pressure and the effects of conditionality, governments had some room for manoeuvre during bailout negotiations. Consequently, they were able to advocate, resist, shape or roll back some of the policies demanded by external actors. Under certain circumstances, domestic actors were also able to exploit the constraint of conditionality to their own advantage. After the bail-out programmes, governments employed their discretion to revert the measures which brought the greatest benefits at a lower cost. Stella Ladi based on her article with D. Tsarouhas on EU Economic Governance and Covid-19 then discussed how the Covid-19 pandemic presented a window of opportunity for the fundamental change of EU economic governance. In contrast to the EU’s “muddling-through” approach during the Eurozone crisis, the adoption of the Resilience and Recovery Fund (RRF) constituted a bold decision based on double-loop learning. As a result, EU economic governance expanded from its regulatory function and is now complemented by a redistributive function as well. The participants in the workshop discussed on the changing EU economic governance, conditionality as a tool for structural changes and the significance of crises (considering also the current Ukrainian crisis) for future developments in the field.

Authors:

Catherine Moury, Associate Professor of Political Sciences, Nova FCSH, Lisbon

Stella Ladi, Associate Professor, Queen Mary University of London and Panteion University

Discussants:

Angelos Angelou, Visiting Fellow, European Institute, LSE ; Teaching Fellow, University of Piraeus

Dimitris Katsikas, Senior Research Fellow, ELIAMEP; Assistant Professor, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Visiting Senior Fellow, Hellenic Observatory, European Institute, LSE

Georgios Manalis, A.G. Leventis Research Chair Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ELIAMEP

Chair: George Pagoulatos, Director General, ELIAMEP; Professor of European Politics and Economy, Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB)