Introduction

Decades of market-driven welfare reforms have resulted in ‘the reconstitution of the nature of social welfare’, marked by ‘a shift towards more market-based, privatised and individualised forms of social reproduction’ (Roberts, 2014: 235). This is increasingly manifested in what Smith and Rochovska (2007: 1175) described as the ‘domestication of neo-liberalism’, a process in which households ‘do not necessarily resist neo-liberalism (although they may under certain circumstances) but [make] attempts – sometimes unsuccessful ones – to find ways to make material life more tolerable’. The process of domesticating neoliberalism coincides with the extensive neoliberal restructuring of the welfare state itself that, especially after the 2008 financial crisis, has led to the institutionalisation of austerity in nearly all advanced welfare-capitalist states (Streeck 2013; Hermann, 2014; Farnsworth and Irving, 2015; Kennett, 2017; Dukelow and Kennett, 2018; Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2018). Under conditions of continuing welfare cuts, reductions in benefit entitlements, the curtailment of socio-economic rights, stagnating wages (Vaughan-Whitehead et al, 2016), increasing inequalities (Milanovich, 2016) and ballooning household debt (eg Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2013, 2015, 2017a; Hiilamo, 2018), the vast majority of households and families are now expected to act even more strategically as collective socio-economic actors to absorb the ever-increasing social risks and costs associated with their social reproduction in the era of financialised capitalism (Dixon, 2014).

For at least two decades, the majority of comparative social policy literature had focused on the role that the family plays as a provider of care, its politics and its implications for gender relations and especially women (eg Lewis, 1992; Saraceno, 2004; Millar, 2016; Chau et al, 2017; Daly and Ferragina, 2018). However, with few exceptions (see Wheelock and Baines, 1998; Wheelock et al, 2003), less attention has been paid to the institutional conditions that enable families as collectivities to generate socio-economic security and independence for its members vis-a-vis both the market and the state. In this chapter we argue that, given the scale of change under the neoliberal reconstitution of social welfare, it is imperative to expand our theoretical understanding of families as socio-economic actors to encompass strategies and practices that extend beyond care provision.

Introduction

In this chapter we interrogate the character of contemporary socioeconomic governance in the EU. We explore the extent to which it has transformed into a neoliberal rule of law (May, 2014) that has placed competition at the heart of the European integration process and its related institutions. In this context, we contribute to the growing literature on the euro-crisis and the decline of Social Europe (Busch et al, 2013; Degryse et al, 2013; Hacker, 2013; Hillebrand, 2013; Crespy and Menz, 2015; Papadopoulos and Roumpakis, 2015; Romano and Punziano, 2015) and, more broadly, to the study of the constitutionalisation of neoliberalism (Gill, 1998; Brenner et al, 2014; Gill and Cutler, 2014; May, 2014).

The chapter draws on empirical evidence capturing the type and extent of regulatory changes in the fields of industrial relations, corporate governance and the coordination of macro-economic policy in the EU. These changes were neither mere responses to the eurozone crisis nor did they apply only to the crisis-hit member states. Many of them began prior to the eruption of the sovereign crisis but it is their pace and breadth that have accelerated since 2008. We argue that the effects of these changes are long term, cumulative and mutually reinforcing and should be seen as integral elements of a relatively coherent project to establish a form of transnational polity in Europe that privileges competition as its regulatory rationale.

The chapter analyses two distinct but related (and mutually reinforcing) transformations in EU socioeconomic governance. The first part reviews key judicial rulings in the fields of industrial relations and corporate governance. It shows how the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been institutionally prioritising market freedoms and competition over labour rights, and especially the right to collective action in an emerging transnational regulatory field in the EU. This has led to a fundamental transformation of the regulatory landscape of industrial relations across Europe in terms that are very unfavourable to organised labour and the many nationally embedded arrangements that promote public rather than market-related objectives. The second part explores how recent institutional innovations have transformed the field of European macro-economic governance along a similar rationale.

Introduction

Greece was the first of the countries in the EU periphery engulfed in the so-called sovereign debt crisis that followed the crisis in the financial and banking sectors. The sovereign debt crisis exposed the serious weaknesses of the politico-economic regime that shaped Greece's development after the end of the military dictatorship in 1974. It also revealed the unprecedented power of unaccountable international financial institutions, banks and agencies to shape the dynamics of government bond markets across the globe and, therefore, the trajectories of national and regional political economies. More fundamentally, the Greek crisis exposed the limits of EU solidarity, and accelerated changes in the future politico-economic governance of the EU: the institutional innovations pursued as a means for managing the sovereign debt crisis, especially within the Eurozone, undermine national economic sovereignty to an unprecedented degree and, thus, place under serious question the role of national democratic politics in the process of EU integration.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the background to the crisis and explores how multiple and mutually reinforcing causes created the ‘perfect storm’ conditions for its eruption. This is followed by a critical presentation of the key austerity and deregulatory measures adopted by the Greek government until the end of December 2011. Most of these measures were preconditions for the tranches of the ‘bailout’ loan agreed with the so-called ‘troika’ of lenders, the ad hoc body comprising representatives of the European Central Bank (ECB), the European Commission (EC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). A discussion of the impact of austerity measures on the economy, welfare and society more generally, as well as our final reflections, conclude the chapter. It is argued that the austerity measures and the deregulatory, promarket, policy reforms prescribed by the ECB/EC/IMF and pursued by consecutive Greek governments have culminated in an anti-social policy that has done nothing to alleviate the crisis. Instead, it has severely reduced socio-economic security, traumatised social cohesion and democratic governance, and sunk the Greek economy into the deepest and most prolonged recession in recent memory with detrimental effects for the state's finances and Greek society more generally.