Economic and Monetary Union Governance at Risk: The Asymmetric Application of Europe's Stability and Growth Pact

This dissertation focuses on the political economy of Europe's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in the aftermath of one of its most severe debacles; namely the Economic and Financial Affairs Council (Ecofin) crisis of 2003. In late November, Germany and France orchestrated a blocking coalition in Ecofin, essentially undermining the entire fiscal framework, the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). A shock of this magnitude preempted the contestation of previously immune risk technologies, opening up new spaces for rethinking how calculative forms of government are deployed within EMU. Although not a rigid binary opposition, this may be conceptualised as a dialectic between risk and uncertainty, which is encapsulated in the relationship between expertise and politics. Thus, how is expertise being transformed in the aftermath of the asymmetric application of SGP and what are the ramifications for the regulatory design of EMU?;As a governmental artefact, EMU incorporates various discursive practices in its construction of new geographies of power and notions of responsibility. A genealogical approach allows us to determine how they condition representations of normalcy, underpinning responsibility, and how the practice of surveillance as regulation, embedded within the political economy of EMU, has changed since the introduction of the 2005 SGP reforms. By internalising notions of normalcy negotiated to accommodate their unique contingencies, states are more amenable to accept responsibility for their fiscal conduct. As a new analytical instrumentality, governmentality directs our attention to how this novel set of discursive practices helps constitute conceptions of normalcy, as anchors for fiscal relations, in this emerging fiscal-monetary space. Uncertainty is a modality of government that informs this transition towards the (re)politicisation of fiscal relations across Europe.;I employ a "governmentality" framework to problematise the reorgansiation of fiscal management from a system predominantly governed through risk to one regulated through uncertainty. Through a critical genealogy, I ascertain what kind of economy of power Europe is implicated in and what this means for governance within and beyond European borders. This involves diagramming the government of uncertainty in a decentred manner in order to trace how power operates through specific discourses (e.g. new monetarism) and practices (e.g. Medium-Term Budgetary Objective) to produce the stabilisation recognised as EMU. In the process, we arrive at a re-imaged spatial-temporal explanation of governance to adequately capture how the political economy of EMU comes to exist through the diffuse technologies through which control happens.