Chapter 1 outlines why we wrote the book, namely, to provide a clear-cut account of the EU’s ‘silent revolution’ leading to a much more vertical new economic governance (NEG) regime after the crisis of 2008 and its effects on European employment relations, public services, welfare states, and democracy; to develop a new analytical paradigm capable of capturing the interplay between the supranational formulation of the EU’s NEG prescriptions, their country-specific deployment, and their effects on labour politics and democracy; to empirically assess the policy orientation of EU interventions in two policy areas (employment relations and public services), three public service sectors (transport, water, and healthcare), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), during the pre-NEG (1957–2008), the NEG (2009–2020), and the post-Covid-19 (2020–2022) period; to analyse the responses of unions and social movements to these NEG interventions since 2009, and their feedback effects on the EU’s post-Covid NEG regime; to show that labour politics matters, as unions and social movements are essential in framing the struggles about the policy direction of EU economic governance along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU politics axis – a direction that may lead to the EU’s disintegration.

This chapter illustrates how the categories ‘migrant’, ‘repatriate’, and ‘refugee’ acquired meaning between diplomatic relations and physical displacement. It argues that departure and arrival reified the networks on which the Italian community had been founded in Egypt, as well as the categories of political membership that defined it. Between 1952 and 1956, the Italian government avoided repatriation out of fear that the displaced population would disrupt the postwar economy. The absence of state policy aimed to forestall the creation of a political community of ‘refugees’ or ‘repatriates’. State actors viewed intergovernmental institutions, instead, as opportunities to manage displaced Italians. When the pace of departures quickened after 1953, the Italian government housed ‘repatriates’ in temporary refugee camps and converted Emigration Centres. Seeking to locate themselves in this Cold War Mediterranean, Italians from Egypt institutionalised their associations in and around the camps and holding centres. Pressure from these groups culminated in the extension of refugee status to Italians from Egypt and the consolidation of a political community.

In Chapter 13, we provide a preliminary analysis of the policy orientation of the EU’s post-Covid-19 new economic governance (NEG) regime to give policymakers, unionists, and social-movement activists an idea about possible future trajectories of EU governance of employment relations and public services. We do that on the basis of not only the recently adopted EU laws in these two policy areas, such as the decommodifying Minimum Wage Directive, but also EU executives’ post-Covid-19 NEG prescriptions in two areas (employment relations, public services), three public sectors (transport services, water services, healthcare services), and four countries (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania). Vertical NEG interventions in national wage policies paradoxically cleared the way for the decommodifying EU Minimum Wage Directive by effectively making wage policy an EU policymaking issue, but, in the area of public services, we see an accentuation of the trend of NEG prescriptions in recent years: more public investments but also much more private sector involvement in the delivery of public services.

This chapter examines how a shared experience of isolation during the Second World War clouded a sense of the future for civilian internees. It focuses on how various historical processes collapsed into the spacetime of confinement for most working-age Italian men in Egypt. British authorities had planned a complete shutdown of the Italian community during Italy’s 1935 Ethiopia campaign, when they perceived the large-scale participation in fascist institutions as a ’fifth column’ threat to their authority in Egypt. After June 1940, Anglo-Egyptian authorities closed Italian institutions, froze bank accounts, restricted movement, and forbade the signing of contracts with Italian nationals. Italian institutional life, which had become central to the population during the after 1919 was abruptly brought to a halt. While the buttressing of the Italian population collapsed during the war, many of its political structures remained intact. In this chapter, the camp is seen as a temporal isolation chamber, one that delimited the horizons of the internees during the war and then moulded a shared experience that would inform their relationship with the post-fascist Italian state after the war.

This chapter examines the departure from Egypt from the perspective of oral history and personal collections. It shows how repatriated Italians remembered their departures, and their reception and integration in Italy. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of imperial nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate how departure and arrival evoked different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. Considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and the reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership for repatriated Italians in relation to other migrant departures to and from the Mediterranean.

This chapter draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

In 1918, Prague became one of the new capital cities that appeared on the map of postimperial Europe. This Introduction suggests that examining urban streetscapes can fruitfully reveal the transformations in daily life caused by war and the transition from Empire to nation-state. It situates the book within a renewed historiography of the First World War and engages with recent approaches to the history of the Habsburg Empire. It also provides the theoretical framework that underpins the work, the rationale for the chosen focus on space, and the people who inhabit that space rather than separate national communities, and a brief discussion of the body of sources used.

Chapter 3 outlines our three conceptual innovations for the study of European integration and EU interventions in the socioeconomic field. First, we shift from the classical distinction of negative and positive integration to one that distinguishes horizontal and vertical integration modes. Second, we propose to go beyond the classical, state-centred (intergovernmental or federal) paradigms of EU law and political science, as we have found that the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime mimics the corporate governance regime that transnational corporations use to steer the activities of their subsidiaries and their workforce. Finally, we pursue an analytical approach that complements existing EU politicisation studies, which assess the salience of Eurosceptic views in media debates, opinion polls, elections, and referenda, as we must study EU politicisation also at the meso-level of interest politics. After all, the political cleavages that structure national politics have neither been created in individuals’ minds at the micro-level nor are they simply an outcome of systemic macro-level changes.

Chapter 7 shows that EU leaders had already started in the 1980s to steer the trajectory of national public services in a commodifying direction. The commodifying pressures from direct EU interventions reached a peak in 2004 with the Commission’s draft Services Directive, which failed to become law because of unprecedented transnational protest movements. After the financial crisis however, the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime empowered EU executives to pursue public service commodification by new means. Our analysis reveals that the NEG prescriptions on public services for Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania consistently pointed in a commodifying direction, by demanding both a curtailment of public resources for public services and the marketisation of public services. Although our analysis uncovers some decommodifying prescriptions, namely, quantitative ones calling for more investment at the end of the 2010s, they were usually justified with policy rationales subordinated to NEG’s commodification script.

In Chapter 4, we identified commodification as the policy orientation most relevant to our analysis of the nexus between EU economic governance and labour politics and developed a corresponding novel analytical framework to assess new economic governance (NEG) prescriptions in the areas of employment relations and public services. Before engaging in this assessment however, we need to understand the prescriptions’ meaning, for which we must make an additional analytical move. The meaning of NEG policy prescriptions depends not only on their wording but also on their location in larger policy scripts and their uneven coercive power across countries, time, and policy areas. Hence, NEG prescriptions are embedded in larger semantic fields and taxonomies, in power struggles over the definition of appropriate solutions to social problems, and in the EU’s integrated but also uneven political economy. Chapter 5 thus first explains the semantic, communicative, and policy contexts in which we situate NEG prescriptions and then outlines the implications of this analytical move for our research design, including case selection, data collection, and comparative approach.

Chapter 8 traces the EU governance of transport services from the Treaty of Rome to the new economic governance (NEG) regime adopted by the EU after the 2008 financial crisis. Initially, European public sector advocates were able to shield transport from commodification, but, over time, the Commission gradually advanced a commodification agenda one transport modality after another. Sometimes, however, the Commission’s draft liberalisation laws encountered enduring resistance and recurrent transnational protests by transport workers, leading the European Parliament and Council to curb the commodification bent of the Commission’s draft directives. After 2008 however, NEG provided EU executives with new means to circumvent resistance. Despite their country-specific methodology, all qualitative NEG prescriptions on transport services issued to Germany, Italy, Ireland, and Romania pointed towards commodification. But the more the Commission succeeded in commodifying transport services, the more the nature of counter-mobilisations changed. Accordingly, the European Transport Workers’ Federation’s Fair Transport European Citizens’ Initiative no longer targeted vertical EU interventions, but rather the social dumping pressures created by the horizontal free movement of services and fellow transport workers. This target made joint transnational collective action more difficult.

“As food increasingly disappeared from shops, market stalls, and restaurants, wartime shortages badly affected city life. By 1917, most Prague residents struggled to obtain basic food items; the city and its inhabitants were cold, due to coal shortages, and dirty, through lack of soap. The state’s rationing system proved insufficient to cover the needs of the population, leading to the blossoming of a black market. Discrepancies in access to food shaped new divisions. Prague was ‘ruralized’ as people grew vegetables in allotments and on balconies. Hungry city-dwellers went on trips to the countryside to purchase food. This new reliance on farmers subverted social hierarchies. An antagonism grew between Prague and the countryside, undermining the unity of the Czech nation. The association ‘The Czech Heart’ attempted to heal the rift by sending hungry Prague children to better-fed villages. Food provision shifted legitimacy away from the Austrian state to national organizations.”

Chapter 6 shows that workers’ wages and employment relations were, until the 2008 crisis, shaped by horizontal market pressures rather than direct political vertical EU interventions in the labour policy area. That changed radically after the EU’s shift to its new economic governance (NEG) regime. We found that the EU’s NEG prescriptions on wage levels, collective bargaining, and hiring and firing mechanisms followed a consistent trajectory that furthered the commodification of labour in Italy, Ireland, and Romania, but less so in Germany. Instead, Germany received decommodifying NEG prescriptions on wage policy that were linked to a rebalance-the-EU-economy policy rationale. Although this policy rationale was still compatible with NEG’s overarching commodifying script, the diverging policy orientation of prescriptions in this area across countries made it hard for unions to challenge NEG transnationally.