Global Discourses in Domestic Politics: Coping with Economic Crisis in Portugal and Spain

There is a significant body of research that provides a useful overview of the complexity of governance in the contemporary globalized world. Even though it is a widely held view that there is currently no hierarchy of power that guides different nation-states in the same direction, scholars have pointed out that national policymaking is interdependent with the trajectories of other countries. We can therefore ask how it is that different nation-states tend to arrive at similar policies, using similar ideas and discourses when there is no external force ordering them to do so. This research puzzle has been approached by the neoinstitutionalist research tradition, which has described the process of growing isomorphism through the diffusion of global models, discourses, ideas and scripts. In this line of thought, national actors are portrayed as ‘unthinking’ actors without agency, who just follow current fashions. However, the mechanisms and rationales by which this global knowledge is incorporated into local contexts have been neglected.

This dissertation approaches these problems through an examination of the 2008 economic crisis. As the impact of this economic downturn was global, the discourses—reactions, explanations, solutions and expectations—were likewise global. This is relevant as the rationale by which the crisis was framed, observed, debated and managed was not made in isolation. But how were those global discourses evoked and utilized when handling domestic politics during the economic crisis?

To address this question, the present thesis studies the global crisis discourses, understood not only as talk but also as actions and knowledge, from a bottom-up perspective. I analyse the mechanisms by which they became part of the national context and what triggered their use in national arenas. Theoretically, I tackle the question from a discursive institutionalist and epistemic governance perspective to investigate how global discourses are utilized in national contexts. Empirically, I study prominent elements of the crisis discourses that spread globally in order to make sense of the way in which they were invoked in parliamentary debates and media reports in Portugal and Spain. The empirical research has been reported in four articles. Article I studies how references to other countries were used in debating national policies during the crisis. Article II examines how a fashionable, globally spread term— ‘austerity’—was used in national policy debates. Article III studies how the intervention by the Troika in Portugal was handled from a discursive perspective. Article IV investigates how a new coordinative political tool— European Semester— was managed in national policy-making. All four case studies in this dissertation have a methodological orientation making use of both quantitative and qualitative research methods. As its quantitative methods, the dissertation uses content analysis and frequency of occurrence to investigate whether and how often certain elements of the global crisis discourses appeared in national policy-making. As to qualitative methods, the dissertation employs discourse analysis and rhetorical analysis to study how global crisis discourses were involved in the arguments, justifications and ideas put forward by national policy-makers when debating and accounting for national policies.

Drawing on the analysis and the results of the four articles, I present three main results. First, I argue that the use of certain references to illustrate and justify political points of view depended on how a country positioned itself in the crisis and within the European community– that is, how national actors identified the country in question. This ‘national’ reference group is the one that makes more sense and is more acceptable for the national audience to compare and identify with, which is why certain countries were evoked as important rhetorical examples to render comprehensible the position of the nation and to define what political aims were to be achieved. Second, I claim that it was not the prevailing situation of a country that explains why national actors started talking about and using ‘austerity’ more. Instead, when ‘austerity’ became a globally fashionable term within which to conceive of, manage and debate the 2008 financial crisis, actors in different nation-states started to follow the trend, arguing and formulating new national policies and reforms under the ‘austerity’ rubric. Third, I argue that, even in coercive practices by which international organizations exert and influence, national actors performed their agency by domesticating the international conditions and using them within and for national political discourses. Therefore, national actors were not only strategic in introducing global ideas – such as catchwords and references to other countries, but also when introducing international measures and guidelines that they had to comply with. Hence, global discourses were used to understand domestic situations within this crisis, to give answers to the problems and to guide national policies. Global crisis discourses were also utilized to legitimize many types of cuts and unpopular reforms, such as austerity policies.

This dissertation contributes to the theoretical understanding of the mechanisms and rationales by which actors in different nation-states come to enact and utilize vii
global discourses in domestic politics by taking a step further towards a diffusion and transfer approach. Although domestic policy-making was guided or influenced by the global crisis discourses, national actors did not remain passive concerning these global discourses. Rather, actors used and invoked those discourses when they were trustworthy in the national context and when they found them suitable to further their own interests. This leads us to the conclusion that it is better to talk about a synchronization of national policies worldwide. That is, nation-states end up following similar trends or moves, but maintain their distance from one another. Even though there are ideas, exogenous models, international recommendations and even requirements that spread worldwide, they are interpreted and utilized in different national contexts.