Congratulations to Robin Huguenot-Noël from the Department of Political and Social Sciences for receiving his doctorate in February 2025, after unanimous decisions from the jury.
Robin Huguenot-Noël successfully defended his dissertation, Re-Embedding Europe: The Political Economy of EU Macrosocialisation, on 21 February 2025.
Over the past decade, in the shadow of the Great Recession and the pandemic, E(M)U macroeconomic has come to the rescue of the welfare state of its members, leveraging joint debt, fiscal and monetary stimuli and targeted job support. This essentially amounts to paradigmatic policy changeover from monetary inflation targeting and fiscal rules of the 1990s, to keep ‘wasteful’ welfare states in check, to the nurturing of a ‘holding environment’ for active welfare states to flourish. This dissertation puts forward a highly original explanation for this volte-face that enriches the ongoing debates of how EU governance and domestic reform have become intimately intertwined. This to an extent, going forward, fundamentally throws into relief the academic division of labour between the comparative politics of the welfare and international political economy.
Read Huguenot-Noël’s thesis in Cadmus.