EU Governance of Transport Services and Its Discontents

Chapter 8 traces the EU governance of transport services from the Treaty of Rome to the new economic governance (NEG) regime adopted by the EU after the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, European public sector advocates were able to shield transport from commodification, but, over time, the Commission gradually advanced a commodification agenda one transport modality after another. Sometimes, however, the Commission’s draft liberalisation laws encountered enduring resistance and recurrent transnational protests by transport workers, leading the European Parliament and Council to curb the commodification bent of the Commission’s draft directives. After 2008 however, NEG provided EU executives with new means to circumvent resistance. Despite their country-specific methodology, all qualitative NEG prescriptions on transport services issued to Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania pointed towards commodification. But the more the Commission succeeded in commodifying transport services, the more the nature of counter-mobilisations changed. Accordingly, the European Transport Workers’ Federation’s Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiative no longer targeted vertical EU interventions, but rather the social dumping pressures created by the horizontal free movement of services and fellow transport workers. This target made joint transnational collective action more difficult.