PhD thesis defence by Odysseas Konstantinakos
How does Europe govern its macroeconomy in an age of permanent crisis? Over the past fifteen years, the European Union has been confronted with a succession of shocks: the Great Recession, the sovereign debt crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, each exposing the limits of the rules and assumptions on which the Eurozone was built. And yet, against considerable odds, the Union has repeatedly found ways to act: suspending fiscal rules, deploying unconventional monetary policy, and ultimately issuing common debt to finance a collective recovery on a scale that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. How did this happen, and what does it tell us about the nature of political and economic change in Europe?
This dissertation approaches these questions from an unusual vantage point. Rather than studying European economic governance from the outside, through official documents, treaty texts, or public statements, it enters the institutional engine room where economic policy is actually made. Drawing on four months of embedded fieldwork inside DG ECFIN, the European Commission's economic policy directorate, as well as extensive elite interviews and archival research, the dissertation reconstructs how the economists, officials, and technocrats at the heart of European governance absorbed the lessons of successive crises, revised their assumptions, and gradually constructed the conditions for policy breakthroughs that, when they came, appeared to arrive all at once.
The project is deliberately interdisciplinary. It combines the tools of political economy, economic sociology, economic anthropology, and interpretive social science to show that macroeconomic governance cannot be understood through the lens of economics alone. Ideas matter, but so do institutions, careers, professional identities, political pressures, and the accumulated memory of past failures. The officials who steered Europe through its decade of crises were neither ideological automatons nor heroic reformers. They were bounded actors, navigating uncertainty, managing political constraints, and learning on the fly in a system designed to resist the very changes it ultimately produced.
The dissertation's central argument is that the transformation of EU economic governance was neither sudden nor inevitable. It was the product of constrained, cumulative learning: a slow, often invisible process through which inherited economic doctrines were quietly revised, new instruments were prepared behind closed doors, and the boundaries of what Europe could do were gradually redrawn, long before any single political decision made those changes visible. Understanding this process, the dissertation suggests, requires sustained attention not only to formal rules and political negotiations, but to the everyday practices, epistemic struggles, and organisational dynamics of the institutions where economic power is actually exercised. At a moment when Europe faces a new wave of geopolitical, ecological, and economic pressures that once again exceed the capacity of its existing frameworks, the question of whether its institutions can learn fast enough and govern efficiently and democratically has never been more consequential.
Odysseas Konstantinakos is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the European University Institute and a Research Fellow at IE University. His research focuses on European economic governance, crisis management, institutional change, and the evolution of EU macroeconomic policymaking from the Eurozone crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic. Working at the intersection of comparative political economy, European integration, and public policy, he is interested in how policymakers learn, adapt, and govern under conditions of uncertainty. He has previously worked for the Economic Diplomacy Bureau of the European External Action Service, the Greek diplomatic mission to the Council of the EU, and a multinational consulting firm. He has taught Comparative Politics at Sciences Po Paris and the political economy of crisis management at the University of Lucerne. He studied Politics, History, and International Relations in Athens, Rome, Paris, and Boston.
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