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.

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.