The European Semester: What Does It Tell Us About the State of European Democracy?

In the proposed paper we intend to discuss the failure of the European Semester to achieve its ostensible goals – developing broad “ownership” over fiscal restraint, budgetary coordination and structural reforms – by pointing to the democratic deficits implicit in its design. We claim that reasons for failure of the European Semester to act as a coordinating mechanism lie in the uneasy coupling of such a “soft“ governance mode with “hard” (and for some even “tough”) forms of governance associated with power politics and domination. Four major contextual problems undermine the Semester’s credibility and effects. In the European Union, and most notably within the Eurozone, the formulation of priorities in budgetary policy is characterized by a) a democratic deficit resulting from executive dominance, the subordination of parliaments and the marginalization of the public, which reduces the process to bargaining among governmental and administrative circles; b) the constitutionalization of budgetary policy choices, which constrains the set of policy options and may lead to a restriction of the space for reflexive deliberation; c) the “disciplinary” logic imposed through asymmetric intergovernmentalism, which reduces the potential for “ownership”, and d) the “tough” treatment of debtor and receiver Eurozone members as a manifestation of existing hierarchies among member-states. We claim that the macro-economic regime of the EMU, stiffened after the crisis, embodies a very partial notion of democracy that resembles “pre-modern” forms of the liberal exercise of authority.