Thatcherism – TINA as an instrument of ‘common sense’

After World War II, British politics was characterized by a consensus between Labour and Conservatives that Thatcher branded a ‘centralising, managerial, bureaucratic, interventionist style of government’ (Reference Thatcher1993: 6).Footnote ² ‘[S]hared assumptions’ led to a ‘policy convergence on the need for social security and welfare reforms’ (Kerr, Reference Kerr2001: 41). The postwar consensus centered around the objectives of full employment via demand management and rigid fiscal and industrial policy, a mixed economy, a somewhat activist conception of government, a corporatist settlement in industrial relations, and the fundamental idea of a welfare state (e.g. Kerr, Reference Kerr2001: 42). These policy priorities created the impression of an overall agreement between the Conservatives and Labour in the absence of any radical alternative policy approach, thereby providing the political and discursive background to the rise of Thatcherism. Thatcher was able to benefit from framing the postwar consensus both as a policy set and as a mode of politics she opposed; she portrayed herself as a politician from outside the system who finally tackled the massive problems of a country struggling with stagflation, mighty trade unions, and an ‘overloaded state’ propped up by self-interested political elites.

However, we should not fall into Thatcher’s trap. As Kerr emphasizes, ‘academics have been guilty of reproducing a narrative which concedes too readily to the rhetorical machinations of the Thatcher governments’ (Reference Kerr2001: 7). Since the narrative of consensus denoted a marginalization of existing conflicts, it served both the Conservatives and Labour: It enabled Thatcher to portray herself as a disruptive influence on postwar politics, and permitted Labour to apportion blame to Thatcher, who was and remains the one to blame for a cataclysmic paradigm shift to neoliberalism, which concealed the actual shift to monetarist discourse under Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan and his Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey.

Let us briefly revisit the historical situation: economic decline had caused a financial crisis in 1976, which meant that the Labour government was forced to apply to the IMF for a loan of almost $4 billion. In return, the IMF negotiators expected deep cuts in public expenditure, which significantly affected the effectiveness of economic and social policies to cure ‘the sick man of Europe’. After years of postwar consensus, the Labour Prime Minister Callaghan switched from the Keynesian course to monetarism in order to meet IMF goals. However, this policy change appeared to be more of a muddling through and culminated in the crisis of 1978/79 – the winter of discontent. Thus, ideas of neoliberal macroeconomics had already been in the air for some time, owing to Labour’s monetarist or rather ‘modified Keynesian’ approach (Coopey and Woodward, Reference Coopey and Woodward1996: 13) as well as former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath’s failed attempt to move to (neoliberal) policy. In other words, neoliberal discourse was not a radical and abrupt paradigm shift; it resuscitated existing debates.

With the perceived failure of Keynesianism to solve stagflation and industrial actions (supposedly) paralyzing the British economy and society, Thatcher’s election appeared to be the solution for the majority of voters. Thatcher benefitted from the feeling of decline by framing her agenda as a solution to the omnipresent problems by referring to a British tradition of entrepreneurialism and a liberal notion of assuming individual responsibility. Besides referring to ‘British decline’, Thatcher exploited the public’s sense of having been taken hostage by the trade unions’ collective conceit and expounded an offensive anti-unionism and anti-collectivism. On the eve of her election, she did what Schmidt suggests for implementing unpalatable policy change:

Thatcher duly disassociated the trade unionists’ putative self-serving protest from the support of the moral majority. She succeeded in doing so by politically manufacturing the crisis. The framing of the winter of discontent as a crisis of ungovernability (Hay, Reference Hay2009) is key here because Thatcher enforced an opportune narrative and eventually promoted a discursive equation of neoliberal stances with common sense. She claimed that ‘there really is no alternative’ (Reference Thatcher1980a) to liberalization if one adheres to common rational and moral principles.

Still, there is a discrepancy between neoliberal rhetoric and policy implementation (e.g. Kerr, Reference Kerr2001: 48; Schmidt and Thatcher, Reference Schmidt and Thatcher2013), which implies a caveat when taking Thatcher’s sermons as accurate policy descriptions. In spite of the programmatic coherence and rhetorical vehemence suggested by TINA, too often, her sermons obscured a rather adaptive and pragmatic policy approach. Thatcherism gradually established itself as a political project, but – at least initially – it was not a full-fledged blueprint with a well-established ideological, macroeconomic itinerary; it was more of an instinctive agenda (Hay and Farrall, Reference Hay and Watson2011). Consequently, we regard TINA as a device to suggest political resoluteness and prevent political U-turns – a lesson drawn from the electorate’s punishment of Edward Heath’s U-turn.

In this context, the notion of instincts is crucial: Calling herself a ‘conviction politician’ (Thatcher, Reference Thatcher1981a), Thatcher exhibited her conviction that her policies were the only reasonable agenda possible. She explained the certitude of her principles:

Following her ‘instincts’, Thatcher persisted in using metaphors of ordinary convictions and values to explain her political stances; she claimed that the government budgets ‘[…] in the way any household budgets’ (Reference Thatcher1983). This image of a reasonable Prime Minister doing what morally and logically needs to be done is reflected in Thatcher relating her political agenda to common sense, sanity, and reason. She declared:

This is why Hall concluded that Thatcherism’s ‘aim is to become the ‘common sense of the age’ (Reference Hall1988: 8). The repetitive equation of neoliberal thinking with common sense might be one decisive variable in the explanation of ‘the strange non-death of neoliberalism’ (Crouch, Reference Crouch2011) and its resilience (Schmidt and Thatcher, Reference Schmidt and Thatcher2013). It also lends potential plausibility to TINA, since citizens should find a consistency between their (middle-class) values and the Tory government’s policy choices. Herein lies one element of the neoconservative, authoritative populism of Thatcherism (Hall, Reference Hall1988). Thatcher sought to ‘naturalize’ and to trivialize political decisions, thereby disassociating herself from the complex logics of political systems and sophisticated politicians, which is characteristic of populism. This trivialization of politics echoes the TINA principle: politics must be constrained by common sense.

Furthermore, TINA rhetoric can be understood as a means of pursuing aggressive political convictions, seeking to establish a friend-foe distinction in the political sphere. Thatcher not only took advantage of the political system, leaving massive power to the Prime Minister, but she also created the impression of constant conflict by using battle and threat metaphors (Charteris-Black, Reference Charteris-Black2011). She adhered to a conflictive mode of politics, claiming: ‘There has been strenuous discussion and dissent – I welcome it’ (Thatcher, Reference Thatcher1981b).

TINA was an essential tool to discredit Labour (and to call a brutal truce with the opponents in her own party). She declared: ‘We have set a true course – a course that is right for the character of Britain, right for the people of Britain and right for the future of Britain […]’ (Thatcher, Reference Thatcher1983). This illustrates the fine line between the – legitimate – conviction of politicians that their political stances are right and appropriate, and TINA as a means of discrediting opposition as irrational and ideologically blinded. Thatcher also called Labour a satellite party of the USSR and said its policies were misplaced in terms of political culture. In the process, she reworked the narrative of (appropriate) ‘Britishness’ and framed her policy approach amidst the sensitive setting of the Cold War.

Thatcher’s approach to politics can be criticized for risking a potential lapse into Schmittian binary thinking and friend-foe distinctions. She deliberately sought political conflict by linking TINA rhetoric to an antagonistic mode of neoliberal and neoconservative common sense. However, there is one paradoxical point: Thatcher’s conflictive mode of politics is potentially inconsistent with discrediting oppositional policies and, subsequently, with the political debate as a discursive battle between legitimate options. In terms of Chantal Mouffe’s (e.g. 2005) political theory, one could argue that Thatcher adhered to antagonism but did not acknowledge a democratic agonism between legitimate adversaries.

Since TINA rhetoric seeks to remove decisions from the realm of political choice and into one of undeniable common sense, Thatcher simultaneously employed both Schmittian conflictive rhetoric and a highly apolitical rhetoric. From these various, occasionally contradicting rhetorical devices and strategies, one can conclude that Thatcherite politics and TINA rhetoric are indeed a curious combination. While Thatcher’s ideological programme focussed on the idea of individuals taking responsibility and no longer relying on society, it is remarkable that she used TINA as a trope to promote this dogma given that TINA, as politically paternalistic, incapacitates democratic citizens. TINA shortens debates; it substitutes deliberation for epistemic or moral authority, thereby contradicting the idea of individual responsibility. In fact, Thatcher’s rhetoric is based on the conditionality of morality. The affirmation of moral principles, of ‘convictions’, is the prerequisite for neoliberal policy making; this moral dimension in the process of decision-making leads to ‘one right way’.

The TINA dictum finally reflects a dialectical move: Thatcher’s use of economic theory to underpin neoliberal policies eventually led to a gradual depoliticization of a former highly politicized policy approach. As a consequence, a process from normative neoliberalism towards normalized neoliberalism gradually took place (Hay, Reference Hay2004; Jessop, Reference Jessop2007). Taking this argument further, it is not only rationalist assumptions but also the moral conditionality of these assumptions and the moralistic discourse that consolidated ‘necessitarian’ neoliberal thinking. The simultaneous use of common sense, the discrediting of Labour, and the production of resoluteness helped to establish a neoliberal settlement. Thatcher, who politicized politics after years of a ‘postwar consensus’ into conflict politics, contributed to a depoliticized settlement of neoliberalism that was no longer questioned. She provided discursive trajectories and political paths for a normalized neoliberalism in the 1990s. As can be seen with New Labour’s discourse, the pendulum of TINA rhetoric swung from politicization to depoliticization, which is from stylized consensus, to stylized conflict politics, to a general settlement. Finally, there is a bitter irony in Thatcher’s TINA rhetoric: Throughout her premiership, her strategy increased political tensions. She remains a deeply polarizing influence to this day.

Thatcher’s legacy and beyond: Third Way Politics and TINA as an all-encompassing rhetoric

With the move from normative to normalized neoliberalism, we can explain why successive governments of social democrats were labeled as post-Thatcherite epigones of neoliberal hegemony. Thatcherism’s legacy can be interpreted as the dawn of a TINA era that continued through the politics of Third Way and New Labour in Great Britain. Tony Blair positioned his New Labour in a post-Thatcherite settlement (Hay, Reference Hay2007, Reference Hay2009). After decades of conflict, New Labour sought to re-establish a new consensus in British politics – justified as an inevitable adaptation to constraints and, behind rhetorical facades of ‘new’ beginnings, displaying a striking degree of continuity.

Third Way politics referred to ‘constraints’ imposed on a nation-state by globalization, which as an abstract notion was concretized into a threat that an agenda had to be distilled from. New Labour and its correspondent in Germany, the government under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, attempted to legitimate their policies by structural adaptation. In Germany’s case that meant Agenda 2010 and the so-called Hartz reforms. The government employed supply-side policies: lowering taxes on company profits and capital incomes, deregulating the employment market, and setting up a disciplinary workfare culture to sort out recession dynamics. The implementation of liberalizing measures sought to resolve specific problems in Germany’s political economy. The threat of recession, high unemployment rates, high wages, a high savings rate, along with the concurrent low consumption rate led the government to strengthen its enterprise culture and restructure the social security system. To date, the Hartz reforms epitomize the ‘neoliberalization’ of the German Social Democrats and have caused a decline in the electoral participation rates amongst the lower classes, which many observers consider symptomatic of an erosion of democratic legitimacy (Schäfer, Reference Schäfer2012).

In a different context, and faced with the persistence of Thatcherite policies under John Major’s government, the British Labour party attempted to reinvent itself. Given the realignment of Labour under Blair, the thesis of a Thatcherite legacy can be substantiated both in terms of rhetorical strategy and policies. Yet, beyond the outward sequential order of these two British cases, New Labour’s discourse presents an alternative use of TINA – it differs from Thatcher’s. It is striking that the argument of constraints in Thatcherism served to create a significant difference in a bipolar political field: Either you were a friend of reasonable, necessary politics, or you were a political foe with wrong, utopian, and devastating ideas. Thatcherite TINA was the rhetorical device of an ideological, moralistic discourse. In contrast, New Labour’s discourse reset the limits of political affinity with the same argument; it neither sought conflict nor abundantly used conflict metaphors. Third Way rhetoric made use of constraints as a strategy of inclusive politics, while employing a strategy of disciplinary governance that at the very least conflicted with a neoliberal understanding of politics (e.g. Andersson, Reference Andersson2010).

Politicians including Blair employed metaphors of conviction and changing realities everyone could agree on. He showed the ‘ability to integrate ethos – having the right intentions – with pathos – sounding right […]’ (Charteris-Black, Reference Charteris-Black2011: 225). He connected his moral beliefs to the morality of the ‘common people’ – as Thatcher had done. In contrast, he appealed to common sense to convince, not to discredit. Besides this ‘commonness’ of his political views, he also employed a specific ethical, communitarian register. In 1995, when addressing a Labour conference, Blair explained his model of socialism thusly:

This use of ethical language implies Blair’s underlying conception of politics as ethics (Charteris-Black, Reference Charteris-Black2011: 230) with an emphasis on society, whereas Thatcher famously declared that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (Thatcher, Reference Thatcher1987). The self-portrayal of a man of conviction and with ethical integrity was also an essential stratagem in Blair’s justification of the Iraq War.

In terms of policies, it becomes clear that in Third Way approaches, international competitiveness is the primordial goal (Blair, Reference Blair1998; Blair and Schröder, Reference Blair and Schröder1999). The strategy of making the labour market more flexible, establishing conditionality in the welfare system and developing human capital were essential. Whereas Thatcherism predominantly debated the division between politics and the market (and the scope of political influence on that), the discourse of necessities shifted from a debate about individuality, agency, national re-boosting, and political or market autonomy to structures of international economic constraints (Hay, Reference Hay2007: 199). Back then, TINA rhetoric was embedded in a construction of globalized and international constraints, where economic liberalization and deregulation were no longer conveyed as a deliberate political programme but as a necessary adjustment: ‘The issue is this: do we shape [change, AS] or does it shape us? Do we master it, or do we let it overwhelm us?’ (Blair, cited in Faucher-King and Le Galès, Reference Faucher-King and Le Galès2010: 159). Thus, the semantics of re-boosting, still implying the idea of progress, changed from an emancipatory notion to the semantics of constraints or forces of circumstance (cf. Rosa, Reference Rosa2005: 418). The notion of progress is crucial. Blair announced that:

Blair’s announcement not only exhibits crypto-Darwinism but it also alludes to the idea of an ever changing, accelerating modernity that exercises evolutionary pressure on society (Hay, Reference Hay2001: 272). The ‘guru’ of Third Way thinking, Giddens, provided ideational repertoires for such an assessment, especially with his notion of ‘Juggernaut-Modernity’ (Reference Giddens1991), which alleged that modernity is ‘a relentless movement leading to a complex, interdependent, and vulnerable world’ (Hildebrand and Martell, Reference Hildebrand and Martell2012: 195). This metaphorical frame of modernity resonated with New Labour’s discourse on globalization, since both processes cannot be steered. Consequently, we can argue that theories of structuration and of reflexive modernity are favourable to concepts of ‘dispersed power’, that is power that stops being exclusive to (political) actors. Such theories provide a prolific discourse that renders the contingent necessary and the power invisible. TINA rhetoric no longer resuscitates political steering optimism, but pragmatism and ideas of adaptation. Furthermore, party politics evolves into a necessary middle approach beyond the obsolete alternatives of left and right politics (Giddens, Reference Giddens1994).Footnote ³

We understand that the Third Way’s TINA rhetoric transcends mere neoliberal priorities; it involves an eclectic ideological discourse to disable political alternatives. The case of Third Way politics illustrates the strategic use of theories, especially that of Giddens’ sociology, communitarianism and the simplistic business school globalization literature. We see a change from a neoliberal ideology seeking to reorganize the domestic economy and monetary policy, owing to national impasses, to one that adjusts to the pressurizing structures of international competition. It is no longer the normative zeal to pursue ‘one right way’, but ‘one possible way’ forward. New Labour deployed an intriguing combination of pragmatism and political zeal; on the one hand, we see a moralizing conflation of modernity and neoliberalism, thus giving New Labour the opportunity to claim credit for its political ‘bravery’ of pursuing unpalatable reforms. On the other hand, politicians such as Blair used the ‘imperatives’ of international competition and the ‘challenges’ of modern globalization to avoid blame for harsh reforms – modernity is irrefutable, after all.

New Labour also displays a link between economic policies and ‘depoliticisation as a governing strategy’ (Burnham, Reference Burnham2001: 128; Foster et al., Reference Foster, Kerr and Byrne2014). One particular reform may serve as an example: New Labour’s decision on the institutional architecture of monetary policy. One can argue that establishing the operational independence of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) not only reflected a move towards ‘a quasi-independent central bank’ (Hay, Reference Hay2001: 271), but it also institutionalized the possibility of constraints within the (national) system of macroeconomic management. The depoliticization involved in purposely separating the setting of interest rates from supposedly self-interested political actors reflected existing discourses in economic theory and their distrust of political decisions (Burnham, Reference Burnham2001, Reference Burnham2014; Flinders and Buller, Reference Flinders and Buller2006). It resuscitated the notion of technocratic expertise; politicians such as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair seemed to have internalized the (neo)monetarist critique of politics (Hay and Watson, Reference Hay and Farrall2004).

MPC’s reform leads us to the question whether this institutional architecture and (neo)monetarism as a macroeconomic approach are preferable to a rhetoric of constraints. Keynesianism is based on the idea that governments steer economic demand to counterbalance economic cycles so that unemployment and inflation can be controlled. Politicians decide on fiscal, monetary, income, and exchange-rate policies, and as these policies are believed to trigger economic activity, politicians are to be held accountable. It would be possible to establish a cascade of public politicization of these policies, since, although all influential, ‘[u]nder normal conditions, monetary policy has relatively low salience in the electoral arena. It is seen to involve highly technical decisions […]’ (Scharpf, Reference Scharpf2011: 5). Central banks or agencies decide on them, thus entrenching a potential gap between input and output legitimacy (Elgie, Reference Elgie1998; de Haan and Eijfinger, Reference de Haan and Eijfinger2000; Scharpf, Reference Scharpf2011).

Informatively, monetarism focusses on price stability and money supply – an objective to be achieved by the ‘non-political’ monetary policies of an independent central bank. If an independent authority such as a central bank decides on the parameters of economic salience, we can expect governments ‘to adjust their claims on the total economic product to the monetary corridor defined by the central bank’ (Scharpf, Reference Scharpf2011: 7). Thus, it is more likely that politicians will refer to constraints and resuscitate ideas of technocratic legitimacy. The depoliticization of monetary policy seems to correlate with TINA rhetoric.

Accordingly, one can understand there being a disposition to TINA in (national) monetary politics. New Labour teaches us that TINA not only refers to abstract international constraints but may also be an endogenous problem of institutional architecture. Thus, we have to consider institutional limitations, processes of governance and policy making, as well as examine the institutional and political conditions of TINA.

Since we took neoliberalism to be a policy set that focusses on fiscal discipline, liberalization, deregulation, etc., this institutional dimension now leads us to the following questions: What if, unlike in the British case, monetary and fiscal policies are, above all else, part of an intergovernmental framework? How do political actors react and maneuver in the ‘corridors’ set by ‘apolitical’ institutions such as central banks but also in the context of supranational and transnational institutions such as the EU? And how can we understand the relationships between TINA rhetoric, Europeanization, and the Eurozone crisis?

Managing the crisis: de-normalizing, yet necessitarian discourse

Taking up the idea of ‘depoliticized’ institutional arrangements beyond party politics, as well as the cycle of opposition and government as a means of discerning TINA rhetoric, one immediately thinks of ‘the institutions’, that is the European Commission and the ECB. Both have been criticized for being technocratic and significant in their roles of promoting (neo)liberalization across Europe.

The ECB pursues its monetary policy based on average rates, initially having assumed a general convergence of a common market. This led to the problem that EMU members can no longer implement nationally adapted and targeted monetary policies, which are adjusted to their specific variables, but are instead subject to the Maastricht criteria, the Growth and Stability Pact, ECB policy, and so on. On the whole, they face inadequate interest rates. (Neo-)Keynesian or non-neoliberal macroeconomic instruments at the national level (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2014), such as fiscal policy and incomes policy, had to counteract the Europeanization of monetary macroeconomic management. They were, however, unable to weigh up the heterogeneous economic conditions in Europe, fuelled by ‘asymmetric’ impulses (Scharpf, Reference Scharpf2011: 20) in a European monetary community. Expansionary fiscal policies and priorities such as social protection and welfare, despite low productivity, conflicted with fiscal retrenchment and high productivity rates. Two growth models clash: export-led and demand-led growth models represent two ‘varieties of capitalism’ and ‘institutional asymmetries’ within the Eurozone (Hall, Reference Hall2014). Then in 2008, the subprime crisis, the credit squeeze, and the distrust of ratings agencies and investors caused a severe global financial crisis.Footnote ⁴

For Greece, Spain, Ireland, and Portugal, rescue-cum-retrenchment was assumed to be irrefutable because its alternative, ‘bankruptcy-with-devaluation’, was perceived to be even worse (Scharpf, Reference Scharpf2011: 23). To stave off the threat of insolvency, the catalogue of conditionality linked to the European Financial Stability Facility was hard: marketization and deregulation were to be implemented and the European Commission and surplus countries including Germany called for dramatic fiscal retrenchment and policy reforms. The quarterly Memoranda reported supervision by unelected experts or technocrats of the Troika of ECB, the European Commission, and the IMF. Relabeled ‘the institutions’ in 2015, their intrusion into national legislation revealed a dilemma between input legitimacy, democratic accountability, as well as (multilevel) macroeconomic management. This constellation exhibits the problem of compliance in supranational and intergovernmental arrangements, thus stimulating populist movements against the EU and Brussels’ technocrats.

The crisis management unveiled an ‘ad hoc technocratization’ of economic policies (Enderlein, Reference Enderlein2013), which was portrayed as a result of the specific requirements of crisis management. The (ever-present) intrinsic frictions of democratic decision-making and the technocratic core of the EU (Mair, Reference Mair2013) were exacerbated: How does one redistribute when the intertemporal implications are unknown? (Enderlein, Reference Enderlein2013: 715).

In times of crisis, high costs are to be accepted so that even higher costs can be averted – a problem that Elster (Reference Elster1979) coined as ‘deferred gratifications’. This challenge for democratic legislation becomes even more severe in times of crisis owing to time pressure, unknown unknowns (Asmussen, Reference Asmussen2012), excessive intergovernmental bargaining, etc. As a result, fiscal and economic policy decisions are outsourced from procedural processes of legitimation, usual delegation, and bargaining, although the very effects of these policies are politically salient and would require input legitimacy. Thus, the democratic problem of (further) technocratization lies in the attempt to compensate for a lack of input legitimacy by referring to a deferred general increase of wealth, which is naturally doubted by public opinion and contradictory expertise (Enderlein, Reference Enderlein2013). Crisis management is not only inadequately explained and therefore persistently questioned but it may also conflict with the democratic articulation of a political will, as in Greece with the election of Syriza. People are suspicious of European integration and intrusion as one outcome of the Eurozone crisis. This is because the political discourse neither openly reflects on the – rather unintended – deepening of integration, nor provides an adequate policy narrative.

Confronted with the delicate political measures of crisis management, that is the rescue packages and politics of recession and austerity, in 12 out of 15 cases between 2010 and 2013, the responsible governments were voted out; we witness a rise of Eurosceptic and populist parties, and the suspension of reform processes in various countries (Hutter and Kerscher, Reference Hutter and Kerscher2014; Schimmelfennig, 2014). Nonetheless, Eurozone governments reacted by forming pro-Euro(pean) coalitions, avoiding referenda, and delegating decisions to supranational institutions such as the Commission. Otherwise, their decisions, taken in intergovernmental procedures at the European level and resembling a ‘federalism of executives’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas2015), could have been reversed or blocked by elections, referenda, and parliamentary ratification (Schimmelfennig, 2014). Amidst a new wave of politicization and a ‘constraining dissensus’ (Hooghe and Marks, Reference Hooghe and Marks2008), political leaders were using ‘shielding mechanisms’ (Schimmelfennig, 2014: 323). Indeed, at the discursive level, TINA rhetoric can serve as one shielding mechanism and as one tactic of a set of crisis management tactics.

The examples of Angela Merkel’s and Wolfgang Schäuble’s rhetoric illustrate the intricacies of crisis management by means of TINA. In the Eurozone crisis, different communicative arenas collide: politicians are simultaneously engaged in a coordinative discourse in the policy sphere and a communicative discourse both with their citizens, that is the public, and the markets (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2014). As the discourse to the market is reliant upon trust, credibility, and expectation management, it might at some point counteract the political discourse, which seeks to persuade and convince an electorate. Along this line, Asmussen (Reference Asmussen2012) criticized Merkel’s justification of the Greek bailout: Merkel insisted on a consequential causal and normative nexus; she and her government declared that ‘If Greece fails, then the Euro fails, then Europe fails’ and that the ‘future of the Euro is at stake’ [e.g. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), 2010]. Merkel hereby intended to inform people about the gravity of the situation, and thus invoked necessity to legitimate extraordinary policies and her turnaround in May 2010. However, she inadvertently provoked distrustful and alarmed reactions in the markets. Her speech appeared in the press under the headline ‘Merkel questions survival of the Euro’ (Asmussen, Reference Asmussen2012; Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2014: 203).

Adhering to policies that are bound to the ordoliberal ‘culture of stability’, Merkel disapproved of an approach involving transnational demand management, a European fiscal union, and debt mutualization (Belke, Reference Belke2012). During the Eurozone crisis, she managed to shape a blend of neoliberal and ordoliberal policies and revitalized patterns of a conservative ordoliberal discourse in postwar Germany. Referring to Konrad Adenauer, who won the election in 1957 by proclaiming: ‘no experiments’, Merkel used this phrase during the last days of her election campaign in September 2013. This matched both her strategy to avoid agitating interest groups and her unfussy style of politics.

In contrast to Merkel’s rhetoric of no experiments, the Eurozone’s policy solutions ‘were highly innovative solutions, and they often ran counter to the EU’s extremely constraining institutional context of the EU Treaties’ (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2014: 197). There were experiments, but these were not very successful and overdue. As the innovative measures taken transcended simple ‘constraints’, TINA rhetoric became part of the usual ‘blame avoidance’ and ‘level game’ again and yet it covered both path departure and path dependency. TINA interweaved both a constrained coordinative discourse in the pitfalls of excessive joint and intergovernmental decision making, and the very notion of ‘systemic relevance’, leaving no alternative to bailing out banks and rescuing Greece.

The latter functionally resembles the (Schmittian) notion of ‘emergency’ in legitimating last-resort discourses. Mario Draghi claimed that the ECB would do ‘whatever it takes’, thereby transcending its mandate as a ‘government of last resort’. The former President of the European Commission, Barroso (Reference Barroso2011), proclaimed – in a quasi-Schmittian manner – that ‘these are exceptional measures for exceptional times’, thereby suggesting a commissionary, exceptional legitimacy.Footnote ⁵

The ECB is less constrained by institutional limitations than other European institutions. Therefore, it could display quick and innovative crisis management by flooding the market with liquidity. Although acting beyond the scope of the ECB’s actual mandate, its decisions – as in 2012 on the programme of the Outright Monetary Transactions by which the ECB purchases bonds in secondary, sovereign bond markets – certainly helped to scale down the impact of the crisis. The ECB still ‘buys time’ (Streeck, Reference Streeck2014) and takes the heat off member state governments by providing financial assistance. Thus, the ECB transcends the orthodox recipes of European economic policies. It has gained importance as an institutional counterforce (Lefkofridi and Schmitter, Reference Lefkofridi and Schmitter2015), in contrast to the neoliberal TINA rhetoric, adding a different approach to the policies of fiscal retrenchment and austerity. Subsequently, Asmussen (Reference Asmussen2012) reminded politicians that the ECB’s crisis management does not suffice when it comes to solving structural political-economical problems; political reforms remain necessary.

Looking at the Eurozone’s crisis management, many of the chosen policy solutions lie beyond the pattern of Keynesianism, monetarism (Schmidt, Reference Schmidt2014: 197) or neoliberalism. Nevertheless, the crisis has not yet led to a paradigm shift away from liberalization, privatization and austerity. Following our stream of thought, one could describe the prevailing process as one of ongoing de-normalization, in which we seem to be stuck in a ‘crisis without alternative’ (Meier, Reference Meier1966). Intriguingly, what we are witnessing can be classified as a persistence of a necessitarian discourse in a period of de-normalizing neoliberalism.