Stabilisierung, Vertiefung und Konsolidierung der Economic Governance: Elitenstrategien in der europäischen Krise

Existing scholarship showed that European economic elites were crucially involved in the creation and design of both, the European integration path in general as well as a neoliberally shaped economic governance in specific. The European financial and debt crisis imperiled this integration project and its neoliberal course. What does this crisis and its induced transformations mean for the strategic outlook of the European economic elites? In order to answer this question, this article sheds light on the different crisis phases from the perspective of these actors and their strategic decision-making vis-à-vis the crisis. These strategic positions are elaborated from publications of the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT) as the central organization forum of the European economic elite and are embedded in the overall crisis dynamics. I show how the strategic outlook of the ERT changes in different crisis phases from a stabilization of the economic governance (2007-2009), its deepening (2009-2012) to its consolidation in the third phase (from 2013 onwards). I close by assessing that this consolidation of the neoliberal economic governance could remain only a temporary fix, not being able to calm the growing resistance against a further neoliberalization of the economic governance from both sides of the political spectrum and hence result in a break-up of the integration project itself in the medium run.