Chapter 4 first reviews earlier studies of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime and discusses the methodological challenges that they pose for the assessment of NEG documents. Earlier studies of NEG policy prescriptions flattened the semantic relationships between the different terms used in them and the power relations between the actors involved in their production. We therefore outline a novel research design that accounts for the links between the policy orientation of NEG prescriptions and the material interests of concrete social groups as well as the hierarchical ordering of NEG prescriptions in larger policy scripts unevenly deployed across countries, time, and policy areas. We address the first point in Chapter 4 and the second in Chapter 5. In 4.2, we identify commodification as the most relevant dimension for analysing the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics. In 4.3, we operationalise the concepts of commodification and decommodification in employment relations and public services and outline the analytical framework against which we assess the policy orientation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions in the policy areas of employment relations and public services.

Chapter 9 analyses the EU governance of water and the countervailing mobilisations against its commodification. Initially, European law decommodified water services through the harmonisation of quality standards that took them out of regulatory competition between member states. However, from the 1990s onwards, the Commission repeatedly attempted to commodify water through liberalising EU laws. When these attempts failed, EU executives tried to advance commodification by new means, namely, through the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions. Our analysis revealed that all qualitative prescriptions on water services issued from 2009 to 2019 to Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Romania called for their marketisation, despite recent calls to increase public investment. Like preceding attempts by draft EU directives, the NEG’s consistent commodification script triggered transnational protests by unions and social movements that defended water as a human right and as a public service, namely, under the banner of the successful Right2Water European Citizens’ Initiative.

Chapter 10 traces the EU governance of health services and its discontents. The first European interventions in the health sector facilitated mobile workers’ access to health services in their host countries, thereby decommodifying cross-border care, albeit by recourse to solidaristic mechanisms situated at national rather than EU level. Since the 1990s however, European horizontal market pressures and EU public deficit criteria have led governments to curtail healthcare spending and to introduce marketising reforms. Thereafter, healthcare became a target of EU competition and free movement of services law. In 2006, transnational collective action of trade unions and social movements moved EU legislators to drop healthcare from the scope of the draft EU Services Directive. After the financial crisis of 2008 however, EU executives pursued commodification of healthcare through new means, as shown by our analysis of their new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania. Even when commodifying prescriptions were on occasion accompanied by decommodifying ones, the latter remained subordinated to the former. Although NEG’s country-specific methodology hampered transnational protests, the overarching commodification script of NEG prescriptions led not only to transnational protests by the European Federation of Public Service Unions, but also to the formation of the European Network against the Privatisation and Commercialisation of Health and Social Protection, which unites unionists and social-movement activists.

Chapter 2 gives scholars and students across disciplines, but also policymakers, trade unionists, and social movement activists, a clear account of the arcane new economic governance (NEG) regime that European Union leaders adopted after 2008. The chapter avoids jargonistic academic language as well as the Euro-speak of the EU’s economic governance documents when describing the setup and operation of the NEG regime. This is important if one wants to understand its internal contradictions and change the operation and policy direction of the EU’s NEG regime.

State aid law controls public spending by Member States by prohibiting aid which damages the internal market and encouraging spending on projects of interest to the EU economy. The Court of Justice plays a central role in delimiting the scope of application of State aid law. The Commission has extensive powers to investigate State aid and may order recovery of funds that are granted illegally. This remedy harms the beneficiary but does little to deter the Member State granting aid. The Commission has been successful in reducing the grant of State aid and encouraging States to fund certain types of State aid which contribute to the EU’s emerging industrial policy. Moments of economic chaos like the financial crisis in 2008 and the Covid-19 pandemic led to a significant relaxation of State aid discipline but the Commission used these two crises to press for further economic integration in the form of the Banking Union and the Recovery and Resilience Facility respectively.

Services are the largest part of modern economies, but often highly regulated, making cross-border service activity hard to achieve. Sometimes, as in the case of abortion, healthcare, education or gambling, they have an important social, redistributive or moral aspect which makes liberalisation of cross-border services politically sensitive. Yet the Court of Justice’s case law is very far reaching, treating any measures which hinder or make less attractive the provision of cross-border services as prohibited unless they can be justified. This applies not just to the State, but to any body restricting market access, including trade unions concerned to exclude low-cost competition from posted workers. Much of this case law has been codified in the Services Directive, which also addresses freedom of establishment, but the Directive has so many exclusions that Article 56 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the case law remain important, as does sector-specific legislation such as that on free movement of patients.