From fiscal prudence to fiscal expansion: a discourse perspective on EU crisis management

In July 2020, the European Council adopted, for the first time in EU history, a common scheme for taking on debt to finance a joint stimulus programme, the so called ‘Next Generation’ recovery fund. Its objective is to combat recession caused by lockdowns adopted against the spread of Covid-19 by massively investing in digital and ecological transitions in member societies. Moreover, means are distributed through an allocation key that considers levels of unemployment and recession, thus benefiting regions and countries most heavily affected by crisis. This crisis management approach is diametrically opposed to the approach adopted for managing the Eurozone crisis ten years ago. Then, fiscal consolidation was adopted as a method to contain both sovereign default and recession, and credits were granted to crisis-struck members only on the condition of austerity and internal devaluation. This paper adopts a discourse perspective to explore how such paradigm shift became possible. It suggests that dynamics of debate on crisis resolution contributed to opening up a space for political action that was deemed untenable earlier. More specifically, the paper argues that causal narratives of crisis that were mainstreamed across European media publics in 2010 and in 2020 each mobilised a different conception of crisis, its causes, culprits and heroes. While addressing seemingly the same problem – the combat of recession induced by external shocks – these narratives each suggested a different vision for problem solution. This argument draws on earlier discursive political studies of crisis (Kutter 2014a,b, 2020) and a primary and secondary analysis of crisis narratives that were issued in Europeanised news and transnational political discourse during the Eurozone crisis (2010-2012), on the one hand, and the Covid-19 pandemic (2020), on the other.