The EU interventionist state: Crises, economic paradigm and the reconfiguration of EU economic governance

The European Union has long been characterized as a regulatory state because of its overwhelming reliance on regulation as a major policy instrument. In the last decade a different picture has been emerging, featuring the rise of more interventionist policy instruments in EU economic governance. A major indicator of this shift is the rise of EU industrial policy. Public spending, brokering and protectionist initiatives have multiplied at the EU level. Sector-specific policies reforms also feature increasing interventionism, with the multiplication of market-distorting instruments, as for example in the energy or financial sectors. We also observe a new relationship emerging between the EU and its member states, whereby the EU relaxes EU regulatory constraints to allow member states to intervene in their economy. In terms of EU – Member states relationship, we interpret this as a reconfiguration of EU governance, that cannot be easily grasped through EU integration lenses that tends to conceive the relationship between the EU and the member states as a zero-sum game. The EU interventionist state implies both new powers at the EU level, and more leeway at the national level, both trends being combined in a new fashion. We account for this reconfiguration of EU economic governance with a combination of new problem pressure due to the multiple crises we have been facing in the last 15 years, an. evolving economic paradigm and institutional constraints of the EU political system