Chapter 11 compares the policy orientation of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions in two policy areas (employment relations, public services), three sectors (transport, water, healthcare), four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania) from 2009 to 2019. It reveals that almost all qualitative prescriptions pointed in a commodifying direction. Most quantitative prescriptions tasked governments to curtail wages and public expenditures too, but, over time, they not only became less coercive but also increasingly pointed in a decommodifying direction, tasking governments to invest more. It would, however, still be wrong to speak of a socialisation of NEG, not just given the decommodifying prescriptions’ weak coercive power but also because of their links to policy rationales that are compatible with NEG’s overarching commodification script. Moreover, Chapter 11 shows that NEG prescriptions tasked governments to channel more public resources into the allegedly more productive sectors (transport and water services) rather than into essential social services like healthcare. Given NEG’s country-specific methodology, it is not surprising that there have been only few instances of transnational action on specific NEG prescriptions. By contrast, the share of transnational labour protests targeting EU interventions broadly defined increased after 2008. This suggests that NEG has been altering protest landscapes.

The chapter provides an overview of the infrastucture concept and argues that it is both an economic and a political concept. It provides an overview of the interdisciplinary literature on infrastructure since the 1990s and situates the book in the debate about laissez-faire and the literature on the American state, taking the side of those who have argued in favor of deeper roots of the American state in the nineteenth century. It also provides chapter summaries and overviews.

As state and local governments moved into the infrastructure field, they also revolutionized public finance and set the stage for infrastructure politics in the twentieth century. Governments at every level broadened their fiscal footprints to accommodate new infrastructure development after the Civil War. Governments were not supposed to direct public money into private hands, but this legal principle was in inevitable conflict with the public–private model of infrastructure development. In any event, state governments created numerous workarounds, most notably by allowing cities to tax and spend instead of states doing it themselves. Finally, the Civil War fundamentally changed the balance of power between federal and state governments. The 14th Amendment seemed to promise a new era of expanded rights for black Americans and other groups against discriminatory state power. As public power spread like a web over economic life, conservative jurists such as Ernst Freund, Christopher Tiedemann, Thomas Cooley, and others asked whether there were any limits at all on government power to advance what legislatures called “the public good.” Their views would inform laissez-faire legalism from its rise after the Civil War until its demise in the 1930s.

When I dream about Hurricane Katrina, it always starts with the refrigerators. Kenmore, GE, Whirlpool, Frigidaire, Amana. Hundreds of thousands of these abandoned appliances stood duct-taped shut on the curbs and yards of homes throughout New Orleans. Katrina refrigerators are not the only, or even the most dramatic, example of the perils of power outages in extreme weather. From rancid food to emergency-room nightmares, communities take a punch when the lights go out. The nation’s aging power grid leaves us more susceptible to such risks. And the growing intensity of floods and storms on account of climate change make things even worse. But Katrina was not the only, or even the loudest siren blow. Since that time, storms have smashed or drowned parts of the grid in the Northeast (Hurricane Sandy), Houston (Harvey), the Southeast (Irma), and, most tragically, in Puerto Rico, where in 2018, Hurricane Maria knocked out 80% of the island’s electricity network, causing the largest blackout in U.S. history. In the same decade, catastrophic wildfires in Northern California focused attention on the neglected and antiquated system operated by Pacific Gas & Electric, which is believed to have ignited several devastating blazes over two years. Killing at least 84 people and destroying billions of dollars in property, the fires also required cycles of deliberate blackouts to protect parched forests from even more incendiary failures. In this way, the grid became both a cause and a victim of violent disaster. We need a power grid that is more resilient – one that has the capacity to cope with the kinds of low-frequency, high-impact events like those described above. In this chapter, I hope to show how we might get there. I’ll explain what the grid is, describe some of the grid’s most serious vulnerabilities – emphasizing the link to climate disruption and the outsized risks faced by marginalized groups – and propose some first steps toward making the grid more resilient and more productive for all.