The Field of European Economic Governance and Austerity Policies: Exploratory Elements (2002-2012-2019)

How to explain, that whereas many observers thought after the first Obama election that the end of 2000 would mark a ‘lasting paradigm change’ to neo-Keynesianism the advisability of pursuing a new policy was so rapidly shut down? In this paper, we would like to outline the binding force of the field of European economic governance, as a power and playing social space where various actors are fighting for the structural logics of reproduction and transformation of the global economic and social order to be materialized. The concept of field does not exclude the existence of objective economic trends, legal-organisational constraints, political agendas nor economic or moral ideas. However, instead of taking them for big factors as themselves, it begs a theoretical construction of the correlation of forces and of meanings at work by ‘going down’ to the level of the individual and collective actors making up the ‘committees’, ‘councils’ and other decision-making bodies in charge of the governance of the euro area. Our assumption is that one of the essential conditions of the deafness to economic alternatives is in this case the product of strategies developed under a field’ structural constraint marked by two elements underestimated in the literature. First, the field of European economic governance actually shows relative sociological stability. Although in the crisis process it has grown stronger compared to other fields, to the point of seeming to be today at the core of the European system, this is mostly because a whole set of actors and positions built well before the crisis has been consecrated. Second, and rather counterintuitively, the field of European economic governance outlines a structure ultimately dominated by staff strongly involved in policy and administrative issues, and much less by pure and purely ‘liberal’ economists. This dual structure seems to us to explain both the policy conservatism that has led to consolidating the austerity paradigm and, simultaneously, the variations from the institutional standard that the more economist actors of the field were authorized to take and in particular those of the central bank. Through a Multiple Correspondance Analysis of top positions’ profiles, the paper will build three mapping of the field (2002-2012 and 2019) and compare it in light of the changes and continuities in EU Economic policies orientations.