Revisiting the Government of the EU: The Eclipse of European dirigisme

This programmatic article’s objective is to encourage research to tackle more directly change in the how the EU has been governed since the mid-1990s. The central hypothesis developed is that the combined effects of economic policy orientations adopted after the Maastricht treaty and around the first Eastern enlargement, largely destroyed the EU’s dirigiste political equipment. Ever since, liberals within the EU’s elites have made the most of the space left open to them, whilst their principal adversaries, largely because they have never managed to reinvent dirigisme at the EU scale, have consistently participated in EU affairs without any ideological compass.