ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses Europe 2020, the European Union’s (EU) economic reform strategy for the decade, which includes specific commitments for the European social dimension. Europe 2020 is included within the European Semester, the EU’s governance cycle in which macro-economic policy is scrutinized and corrected to ensure that the Member States remain within EU benchmarks. The Semester, along with a number of other policy reforms, was introduced to both respond to the Eurozone crisis and to ensure that a future similar crisis was prevented. The chapter argues that the reforms to EU economic governance further strengthened the asymmetries between economic and social actors within the EU and the political environment within which the social actors were to achieve their goals. It is divided into three sections. The first section of the chapter analyses the causes of the Eurozone crisis and the EU’s initial attempts to address it. The second section of the chapter focuses on the formation of Europe 2020, as well as the aims and objectives of the economic reform strategy. The governance arrangements introduced to govern EU fiscal policy and Europe 2020, as well as to improve the policy interdependencies between the various policy areas are interrogated in the third section. The final section of the chapter outlines the political hierarchy of the post-2010 governance arrangements and thereby the structural conditions within which social actors are required to operate and achieve their aims.
