The rise of neoliberalism came along with the proliferation of instruments aiming at measuring, monitoring, and evaluating State’s behavior with respect to debt, corruption, democracy. Neoliberal emphasis on calculation and standardization as strategies to manage uncertainty made measurement a formidable source of knowledge and power for setting policy frameworks and imposing a system of values. Based on a neo-Gramscian approach, this paper argues that measuring instruments have played a political-ideological role in legitimizing the neoliberal restructuring of EU’s States, and suggests that such transformation realized through a twofold process over different stages of European integration. The creative destruction of ‘roll-back neoliberalism’ turns the State into ‘evaluated State’, with measurement acting as a disciplining tool for potentially unruly states. The construction and consolidation of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’ turns the State into ‘evaluative State’, an institutional regulatory regime aiming at disciplining its citizens, based on the technocratic embedding of routines of neoliberal governance.
