Governing Growth in the European Union: Building the EU’s Economic Government through Experimentation

The establishment and development of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) have long reflected the European Union’s ambition to govern the economies of its Member States beyond a narrow logic of market integration. While mainstream interpretations of EMU have emphasised its regulatory and stability-oriented character, the EU has also progressively built institutional structures that aim to exercise a more active role in economic government within its multilevel polity. Over the past three decades, the Union has developed growing capacity to steer domestic structural reforms through evolving governance architectures of socio-economic policy coordination. Despite the at times limited implementation of EU recommendations in this domain, supranational actors—particularly within the European Commission—have remained strongly committed to expanding the EU’s involvement in national socio-economic policy-making through institutionalised channels. Given the deep diversity of Member States’ growth and welfare regimes, this institution-building endeavour has unfolded in a highly experimental manner. This paper, representing the opening section of my PhD thesis, examines the long-term development of the EU’s institutional capacity to influence domestic structural reforms, with particular attention to the drivers of its emergence, persistence, and frequent redesign. The paper develops a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing the EU’s evolving architecture of socio-economic governance, focusing on the endogenous dynamics of gradual institutional change. Building on historical institutionalism, theories of experimentalist governance, and insights from comparative political economy, I conceptualise the EU’s approach as a form of institutional experimentation that aims to reconcile the tension between uniform surveillance and differentiated national socio-economic models. The paper introduces the notion of a meta-institutional modus operandi, referring to the informal but routinised processes through which EU and national actors negotiate changes to governance frameworks themselves. These dynamics are often overshadowed by debates on policy content but are crucial for understanding how coordination procedures evolve over time and how the EU incrementally builds capacity in domains of limited Treaty competence. The analysis highlights how this modus operandi becomes visible during key redesign phases—such as the creation or reform of the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPGs), the Open Method of Coordination and the Lisbon Strategy, the European Semester, and the governance structure of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). Methodologically, the broader dissertation employs sequential process-tracing to analyse these episodes, reconstructing how actors’ preferences, strategies, and interpretations evolve across successive cycles of coordination. The empirical chapters (not included in this submission) will combine elite interviews and archival research to uncover the mechanisms linking earlier governance designs to later reforms. The paper (as well as the broader PhD thesis) contributes to debates on the evolution of EU socio-economic governance, the role of experimentation in institution-building, and the changing nature of the centre formation of the EU polity, going beyond the traditional divide between intergovernmentalism and supranationalism.