The rise of technocratic politics in the EU: the legacies of neoliberalism

Abstract Recent EU crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, have exposed the shortcomings of the EU’s institutional design as well as the resistance of the EU’s economic governance to pluralism, advocating for an unmediated relationship between elites and citizens and disregarding traditional forms of accountability. They have also exposed tensions between EU economic governance and representative democracies, resulting in forms of anti-system politics and technopopulism, in both Western and Eastern European societies. This paper argues that these tensions result from the post-1970s transformations of the EU’s political and economic governance, which aligned with a neoliberal trajectory that was normalised in the 1990s and in the post-Maastricht period. The historical trajectory leading to these conditions is relevant for understanding the common risks to representative democracies in the EU and inspires an analytical framework for examining cases from comparative perspectives in both Eastern and Western European societies. The framework identifies two key factors for further advancing EU studies: the legacy of EU economic governance since the 1970s and the weakening of party politics amidst the rise of the neoliberal doctrine.