Reconfiguring National Policy-Making: the Gendered and Authoritarian Effects of the EU’s Economic Governance on National Policy-Making Processes in Finland

In the past decade, the European Union’s new post-crisis economic governance regime has significantly enhanced European integration in the area of economic policy. The new governance regime has been criticized for being gendered and dedemocratizing. While the EU’s policy priorities and recommendations have negatively affected in particular low-income and minority women in member states, the EU institutions’ narrow and masculine understanding of the economy, the focus on fiscal consolidation and competitiveness, and the increasingly authoritarian governance processes have made it difficult to see and address these impacts. In order to mitigate the rise of populism and other signs of disintegration, the strengthened economic governance was later complemented with efforts to strengthen the social dimension as well, notably through the European Pillar of Social Rights. The Pillar has been integrated in the European Semester, the key surveillance and monitoring process of the EU’s new socio-economic governance, but competitiveness, budget discipline and ‘market-building’ policies continue to have primacy over social goals and ‘market-correcting’ policies. To date, feminist literature on the impacts of the EU’s crisis response at national level has focused on the gendered and intersectional impacts of the EU’s crisis response on everyday lives and on how these policies reproduce gendered and racialized hierarchies. Less attention has been payed to how the EU’s new economic governance rules and processes have transformed national fiscal and budgetary processes as well as power dynamics between economic and social actors in ways that may entrench such policies and make challenging them more difficult. The paper turns attention from policies to processes and assesses how the EU’s strengthened post-crisis socio-economic economic governance has influenced policy-making processes in Finland, a euro country that has since the 1990s been shifting from a Nordic welfare state into a neoliberal ‘competition state’. Focusing on the national implementation of the European Semester process and the impact of the new EU rules on fiscal and budgetary processes, the paper asks the following questions. 1) How has the further integration in the field of socio-economic economic governance influenced national policy-making processes and relationships between economic and social actors therein? 2) How are these reconfigured processes and practices gendered, and do they reflect the depoliticizing and dedemocratizing tendencies at EU-level? 3) Is there room in these processes for promoting social goals or for integrating critical feminist knowledge? The paper illustrates, based on the Finnish case, how the gendered and racialized economic policies implemented across the EU as part of the EU’s strengthened economic governance have been coupled with less visible but not less significant shifts in national policy-making processes