Common Goods or Comparative Advantages? Legitimation of Austerity in Public Debates in Ireland and Finland

The Eurozone crisis has deprived European citizens of meaningful political choice as as governments across creditor and debtor states have responded with one dominant policy idea, austerity. How has this been politically possible? This paper emphasizes legitimation of austerity in domestic policy debates. The argument is that adaptation pressure in the Eurozone works as a two-stage process, whereby coalitions of domestic executives and EU actors first agree on policies that are then legitimated both formally, through the legislature and informally, in public debates, in the target countries. The paper compares patterns of legitimation in the public debates between one debtor state, Ireland, and one creditor state, Finland. Significant similarities in the patterns of legitimation in the two countries would give support to the existence of strong top-down adaptation pressure in the Eurozone. Big differences would point to a persistent divergence in how domestic political systems adapt to economic pressures.