Law, Political Economy and the New European Union Governance

2026-07-22

The EU pandemic crisis management, including the European Central Bank Asset Purchase programmes and the Next Generation EURecovery and Resilience Facility programme, has been giving rise to a new kind of governance. Europe seems now to be changing its political economy from market discipline (austerity, neo-liberal, ordo-liberal) to interventionist (neo-Keynesian). It is a process of change in governance still ongoing and unpredictable. The conventional focus consists of evaluating whether the relevant political actors will make that change systemic, rather than only temporary and exceptional for then returning to the pre-pandemic market disciplinary framework; moreover, scholarship looks at the law as only instrumental to the key political actors’ choices and agendas. Political economists attempt at making sense of the process according to their theories. This project sees more complexity: law exercises its own autonomous role in governance transformation; law needs to be looked at if one wants really to understand governance transformation. The proposed JM CofEx will work towards filling this gap with an interdisciplinary perspective, the project looks at changes in governance both as political economic and in terms of the law (the European constellation constitutional process), in parallel and as influencing each other. The centre’s activities are organised in two steps: mapping the ways in which legal actors participate in the struggles over political economic stakes (over interventionism vs market; more/less interventionism) and the ways in which they also constantly redefine law in relation to those struggles (WP1); offering a picture of the ongoing transformation of the EU through the struggles over law and governance as characterising the EU pandemic (and post-pandemic) crisis management in terms of the structure of the EU as quasi-federative, of its legitimation resources and of the relations of sovereignty of the EU with its constituent units (WP2).

Italy

2025-12-15