EU Governance of Public Services and Its Discontents

Chapter 7 shows that EU leaders had already started in the 1980s to steer the trajectory of national public services in a commodifying direction. The commodifying pressures from direct EU interventions reached a peak in 2004 with the Commission’s draft Services Directive, which failed to become law because of unprecedented transnational protest movements. After the financial crisis however, the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime empowered EU executives to pursue public service commodification by new means. Our analysis reveals that the NEG prescriptions on public services for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania consistently pointed in a commodifying direction, by demanding both a curtailment of public resources for public services and the marketisation of public services. Although our analysis uncovers some decommodifying prescriptions, namely, quantitative ones calling for more investment at the end of the 2010s, they were usually justified with policy rationales subordinated to NEG’s commodification script.