Knowledge Production in EU Socio-Economic Governance: Governing Member States’ Economies and Populations

The extensive research on significant role of knowledge and expertise in EU governance has mapped different forms of expertise and its organisation and impacts, reflected on the functions of this knowledge in EU policymaking (e.g. legitimising, instrumental, substantiating), and discussed its links to democracy and technocracy. Somewhat less attention has been paid to the productive role of knowledge in EU policymaking and the way knowledge production shapes and organises the policy fields to governed at the EU-level and the EU’s authority in these fields (see however Walters and Haarh 2004; Carmel 2018). This paper examines the productive role of knowledge in EU policymaking through the case of the European Semester, the key tool of the EU’s socio-economic governance that is a prime case of an EU process where technical knowledge and expertise play a crucial role. The Semester started as fiscal and economic policy coordination but has expanded EU scrutiny to various socio-economic domains, including healthcare and education, where the EU has limited authority to act (Erne et al. 2024; Verdun and Zeitlin 2018). Drawing on a Foucault-inspired governmentality approach and research on hierarchies of knowledge in policymaking, the paper examines, how the knowledge produced about member states’ public finances and socio-economic situations within the European Semester brings national economies and populations into being and makes them governable by the EU. What kinds of ways of knowing are prioritized in the European Semester and with what effects for the constructions of national economies and populations? What struggles underpin knowledge production? How does the Commission assert its power across policy fields through the knowledge that it produces about the member states? The paper answers these questions through in-depth analysis of three country cases: Austria, Finland and Ireland. These are all small member states differently positioned vis-à-vis EU economic governance, with different welfare regimes and economic situations. The data consists of the European Commission Country Reports for the three countries from 2011 to 2024, as well as of 50 interviews with EU and national civil servants and interest groups that participate in Semester processes relating to the three countries. The paper argues that within the European Semester knowledge production does not only serve as tools for legitimisation and persuasion; it also makes different economic and social fields and different subjects legible targets of EU governance. Over the years, the contours of what is knowable and thus governable have significantly expanded but also been subject to constant struggles among the actors who participate in the process.