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.

Chapter 14 concludes the book, highlighting its major theoretical and practical insights for the study of EU integration and for the prospects of democracy in Europe. The technocratic design of the EU’s new economic governance (NEG) regime eschewed citizens’ and workers’ political rights to have a say in policymaking; and the commodifying bent of its prescriptions eroded their social rights to be protected from the vagaries of the market. After the pandemic, the technocratic bent in EU economic governance endured, as the National Recovery and Resilience Plans were co-designed by national and EU executives without any meaningful input from unions and social movements, and without national parliaments and the European Parliament making any amendments. The commodifying direction of the NEG regime also endured post-Covid, albeit with some concessions, notably in employment relations. EU executives have had to face the prospect that the hollowing out of social rights that resulted from commodification is pushing electorates towards Eurosceptic parties. In the current unstable context, labour politics matters a lot. Unions and social movements are essential in framing the social and political struggles about the policy direction of EU economic governance along a commodification–decommodification axis rather than a national–EU politics axis.

This chapter examines how Austrian patriotic culture came to pervade the city’s streets. It demonstrates that an Austrian mobilization did take place in the Bohemian lands and addresses the larger question of the wartime relationship between state and civil society in the Habsburg Empire. The patriotic discourse was not just imposed from above, it was also abundantly relayed by private associations and among the public through denunciations and public collections. The wartime patriotic culture became part of the urban landscape through the display of flags, processions in the streets, and the ban on pan-Slavic colors. Prague’s inhabitants contributed to collections for soldiers or widows and orphans, and were constantly expected to join in the common sacrifice. Volunteers raising money as well as ubiquitous posters urging them to give more for war victims were constant reminders of a conflict that became inescapable in everyday life.

Chapter 3 examines the connections with the front through the support to local soldiers and the arrival of war victims, highlighting the dialectics of the war’s absence and presence in a city at the rear. The city functioned as a dynamic space, not in any way sealed off from the realities of war. Local solidarity played a major role in wartime mobilization, as evidenced by the gifts sent to absent soldiers. The commemoration of war dead without bodies and the requisition of church bells marked the changes in mourning rituals. The cityscape underwent visible transformations due to the arrival of both wounded soldiers and refugees from the East fleeing the Russian advance. Both groups brought home the destruction and suffering created by the war Austria–Hungary was fighting. Initial support from the authorities and the population soon gave way to fears of epidemics and growing hostility in the case of the refugees.

This chapter charts the evolution of social unrest in the streets of Prague from the war years to the end of 1920, a moment of heightened occupation of public space by crowds. Most of these protests resist clear-cut labels as socialist or nationalist. They must be considered in terms of the protesters’ relationship to the state, in the larger context of the Habsburg Empire’s collapse and the Czechoslovak republic’s difficult stabilization. Food supply deficiencies generated many riots, demonstrations, and strikes. The trajectories of protests, from suburban centers of local power to the city’s main squares, show declining trust in imperial institutions and increasing recourse to violence. Postwar demonstrations signal a shift in conceptions of citizenship and democracy, the streets becoming a forum for legitimate popular political participation. The housing crisis and evictions by crowds constitute a good case study of the willingness to resort to direct action to establish a new form of social justice.

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.

The first chapter explores the new presence of the military in the city after the start of the war. It analyzes the militarization of civil society and the blend of increased prestige and tensions in civil–military relations characteristic of wartime. During the mobilization days, reactions in Prague resembled scenes in other European cities: streets buzzing with anxious agitation as crowds thronged army barracks and train stations. Increasingly ubiquitous gray uniforms delineated new visible wartime hierarchies. Contacts between soldiers and civilians sometimes led to violent clashes, especially prevalent around cafés and pubs. These locales were also hubs for spreading information in a context of increased censorship and military repression. General suspicion by the military authorities transformed Prague residents’ experience of the rule of law. The different facets of military mobilization and emergency measures in urban space are examined to contribute to the discussion on the nature of the Habsburg military wartime government.

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.