The New Economic Governance: The Reaffirmation of a Fiscal Governance Machine

This article engages critically with the International Governmentality Studies, delineating a new use of Foucault's toolbox applied to analyse the New Economic Governance (NEG) reforms. The main argument is that the NEG is a reaffirmation and a reinforcement of the fiscal governance machine established with the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP). The fiscal governance machine is an ensemble of techniques shaped by and through which the European art of government is able to work in the entire European space. The article analyses how the Treaty on Stability Coordination and Governance reaffirms this fiscal governance machine. By looking at three techniques – the structural deficit, the Fiscal Council, and the Automatic Mechanism – it shows some key features of this fiscal governance machine: a new discretional power in the hand of the European Commission and of its DG Finance, a decentralised and semi-automatic form of control on Member states, the structuration of a euro-national ensemble of executives and finance institutions.