Unapologetic Neoliberalism: EU Discourse on Learning and Skills

This paper is a longitudinal study of EU discourse on the role of education and training for employment. Guided by the discourse-historical approach, a mixed-method approach departing from a textometric analysis of the EU’s Joint Employment Report (1997-2024) aims at uncovering discursive change and shifts. Complemented by qualitative discourse analysis, interviews and participant observation, these shifts are then contextualized at different levels ranging from broad socio-historical context (macro) to politicization and bureaucratic reorganization of the European Commission (meso-micro). I use ideological ideal-types of socio-economic policy making in the EU – namely, neoliberalism, social democracy and neo-mercantilism – to show how discourse on education-employment has become unapologetically neoliberal. Whereas the broad agenda of “lifelong learning” initiated in the 90s bloated with social democratic elements and occurred in the context of “polity-building”, more recently, “skills” have emerged as the new conceptual keyword of education-employment. (Skilled) workers are portrayed as mere commodities as education and training’s primary purpose is reduced to satisfying supposed and/or projected market demand. I argue that the Eastern enlargement, the failure of the constitutional project and the leadership of Barroso at the helm of the European Commission provided the backdrop for neoliberal radicalization after the Eurocrisis. Within the Commission, I show how the educational policy field has been absorbed into the EU’s core of economic coordination. For the ECPR Section on Critical Policy Discourse Analysis, I believe the paper makes two important contributions: 1) it investigates ideas and discourse over time and relates change and continuity across different levels of analysis and 2) it mobilizes a mixed-method approach combining document-based discourse analysis with ethnographic and sociological elements through participant observation and interviews.