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Crisis, Ideas and Policy Transformation: Experts and Expertise in European International Organizations, 1973-1987
Maastricht, Netherlands
30-31 January 2014
The financial and economic crisis since 2008 has highlighted the role of international organizations in shifting discourses and transforming policies in such transnational socio-economic crises. It has also brought into focus the importance of experts and expertise in discussing, addressing and providing possible solutions for such crises.
Crisis and crisis experience were central to Western European history between the first oil crisis of 1973 and the decision to create a fully-fledged internal market in the Single European Act which came into force in 1987. The oil price shock precipitated the first post-war energy crisis and contributed to the stagflation in the 1970s, with low growth rates, rampant inflation, growing unemployment, budget and state deficits and monetary instability. But this socio-economic crisis also generated new policy ideas and preferences and institutional reforms to address structural issues in different sectors affected by the crisis and the effects of accelerating globalisation - eventually allowing the completion of the internal market already foreseen in the EEC treaty of 1957.
In the increasingly interdependent and to some degree integrated Western Europe in this time period between 1973 and 1987, European international organizations (IOs) such as the OECD, the UNECE and the EC played a crucial role in debating and addressing manifold dimensions of the crisis, shifting discourses and transforming policies at national and European level, especially in the EC. These IOs drew heavily on experts and their expertise in managing crisis and seeking solutions for structural problems. The European Commission for example relied heavily on expertise provided by scientists/academics, consultants, and the representatives of interest groups. In the transnational context of European integration broadly conceived, transnational communities of experts emerged and played an active role in debating and addressing both sectoral and broader institutional and legal integration issues.