Elite Fidelity in Europe's Crisis Management Regimes

Elite Fidelity in Europe’s Crisis Management Regimes Cornel Ban Associate Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Organisation Cba.io@cbs.dk Leonard Seabrooke Professor, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Organisation Ls.ioa@cbs.dk Abstract How policy elites occupy positions within broader governance architectures is important in understanding how crisis management regimes are produced to respond to macroeconomic woes. We examine the crisis management regime forged to address Europe’s recent economic crisis and the policy elites holding top management positions in the supranational economic governance bodies constituting this European crisis management regime: the European Central Bank, European Fund for Strategic Investments, the European Investment Bank, and the European Stability Mechanism. The career and educational characteristics of elites embroiled in this “command situation” are examined, as is their location in elite policy networks. In contrast to many studies of contemporary elites wielding political and economic power, we find that below the very top tier Europe’s policy elites have conventional careers with little public-private mobility or high-end educational prestige. Furthermore, these elites have ‘fidelity’ in staying with public organizations. Coherence in the European crisis management regime reflects these characteristics, which then combines with regional power asymmetries. Our findings contributes to the emerging literature in comparative field analysis in international financial institutions and suggests that studies of elites must carefully consider regional characteristics so as to not over-generalize elites as Ivy League educated transnational pragmatists who float between private and public realms. Keywords Elites; command situations; economic crisis; professions; expertise; prosopography.  Introduction The resurgence of interest in how elites influence political economies follows a need to identify and locate elites that have disproportionate influence over how policies and policy programs are created and implemented . NOTES Savage, Mike, and Karel Williams. "Elites: remembered in capitalism and forgotten by social sciences." The Sociological Review 56 (2008): 1-24. In this regard, scholars showed that bridging political economy and elite studies requires analyzing the national, regional, and international contexts in which elites emerge and reproduce themselves. Scott, J. “Modes of power and the reconceptualization of elites”. In Remembering Elites, pp. 27–45. Blackwell Publishing, 2008; Morgan, Glenn. "Elites, varieties of capitalism and the crisis of neo-liberalism." In Elites on Trial, pp. 55-80. Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2015. To date, studies of elites in contemporary globalization in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Asia tend to emphasize the similar view that elites have converged around forms of transnational socialization, professional competition and education that push either neoliberal economic policies Dezalay, Yves and Gaeth, Bryant G. The internationalization of palace wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest Transform Latin American States, University of Chicago Press, 2002; Fourcade, Marion. "The construction of a global profession: The transnationalization of economics." American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 1 (2006): 145-194; Bockman, J., & Eyal, G. (2002). Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism. American Journal of Sociology, 108, no. 2, (2002): 310–352; Van Gunten, Tod S. “Cycles of polarization and settlement: diffusion and transformation in the macroeconomic policy field”. Theory & Society 44, no. 4 (2015): 321-354; Ban, Cornel. Ruling ideas: How global neoliberalism goes local. Oxford University Press, 2016. or defend local dirijiste traditions. Yoo, Taeyoung, and Soo Hee Lee. "In search of social capital in state-activist capitalism: Elite networks in France and Korea." Organization Studies 30.5 (2009): 529-547; Naczyk, Marek. "Taking back control: comprador bankers and managerial developmentalism in Poland." Review of International Political Economy (2021): 1-25. Scholarship has also discussed how elites managing economic crises and the recovery from them are “privatized” even when performing public duties by between the public and private sectors to accumulate power with a view transforming their own economies as well as others’. Vauchez, Antoine, and Pierre France. The Neoliberal Republic: corporate lawyers, statecraft, and the making of public-Private France. Cornell University Press, 2021. This view of elite power in economic policy has also been applied to the European Union (EU), an area where “analyses of the people building Europe in the day-to-day life of the European Union’s institutions and its policy-making have multiplied to such an extent that they now represent a vast subfield” (Westlake and Georgakakis editorial introduction). There is a strong consensus in political economy that the supranational organizations responsible for crisis management in the eurocrisis include the ECB, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Commission (EC); often called the “Troika”, the “Institutions” or “Quadriga” when including the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). Lütz, Susanne, Sven Hilgers, and Sebastian Schneider. "When numbers don’t add up: Bureaucratic culture and conflicts in EU–IMF programs." The Political Economy of Adjustment throughout and beyond the Eurozone Crisis. Routledge, 2019. 38-57. The influences of these institutions’ policies and their organizational characters have been examined close to the point of saturation. Here the conventional view is that the eurocracy, the intergovernmental elites in the “surplus countries” as well as their supporters in business and economic expertise advocate for and enforce a turn to austerity through organizations such as the Quadriga. Howarth, David and Rommerskirchen, Charlotte. “A panacea for all times? The German stability culture as strategic political resource.” West European Politics 36, no. 4 (2013): 750–770, Braun, Benjamin. "Speaking to the people? Money, trust, and central bank legitimacy in the age of quantitative easing." Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 6 (2016): 1064-1092; Krampf, Arie. "From transparency to ambiguity: the impact of the ECB’s unconventional policies on the EMU." Journal of European Integration 38, no. 4 (2016): 455-471.. Some scholars have further argued that the increasing delegation of authority over economic policies to supranational authorities has been supported by power elites who favor an even more extensive hollowing of egalitarian democracy in such decisions. Streeck, Wolfgang. “How Will Capitalism End?” New Left Review May/June, no. 87 (2015): 35-64. Matthijs, Matthias. "The Euro’s “Winner-Take-All” Political Economy: Institutional Choices, Policy Drift, and Diverging Patterns of Inequality." Politics & Society 44, no. 3 (2016): 393-422; This view was recently nuanced by more recent scholarship showing that this delegation, while problematic, covers a whole spectrum of legitimacy outcomes, from the neutralization of democracy to the repoliticization of once purely technocratic issues Schmidt, Vivien A. Europe's crisis of legitimacy: Governing by rules and ruling by numbers in the eurozone. Oxford University Press, 2020. and from the bolstering of neoliberalism to its hybridization with Keynesianism. van’t Klooster, Jens. "Technocratic Keynesianism: a paradigm shift without legislative change." New Political Economy (2021): 1-17; Ban, Cornel. "Central banking in pandemic times." Global Perspectives 2.1 (2021): 24188. Ban, Cornel, and Bryan Patenaude. "The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund." Public administration 97.3 (2019): 530-545. Yet irrespective of the position being adopted, several implicit arguments constitute the relatively foggy elite background of a political economy debate that has developed somewhat apart from sociological work on EU institutions, a parallel development that we aim to close in this paper. This paper takes a different tack by attempts to forge links between political economy and sociological argumentation in order to map out the boundaries and gauge the characteristics of the European power elite managing the economic crisis of the eurozone between 2008-2014. To do so, we identify sources of productive conflict that we aim to convert into sources of analytical cross-fertilization that can potentially advance the state of the art in the political economy of the eurocrisis. In our conceptualization, the main organizations in the Quadriga and the rules and norms that structure them are constitutive of what we refer to as the “European crisis management regime” (CMR). Our ecumenical understanding of international regimes draws on Ruggie, John Gerard. "International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order." International organization 36.2 (1982): 379-415. While the intergovernmental European Council is part of CMR and is the site where the critical decisions about crisis management were adjudicated, the fact that it is composed of national heads of state makes it a less interesting site for studying transnational elite networks. Therefore, our strategy was to focus on the supranational financial institutions of the CMR: the central bank (ECB), the “bailout fund” (European Stability Mechanism) and the counter-cyclical public lenders (European Investment Bank (EIB) and the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI)). Functionally speaking, the ECB and the ESM managed the linked Eurozone financial and sovereign debt crises. In turn, the EIB and EFSI tried to address the decline in investment that bedeviled the Eurozone in the aftermath of the Great Recession and the post-2010 turn to austerity after. The state of the art and its problems The paper engages head on with three analytical problems in the literature. First, for political economists both global economic institutions Chwieroth, Jeffrey M. "Capital ideas." Capital Ideas. Princeton University Press, 2009. Ban, Cornel. Ruling ideas: How global neoliberalism goes local. Oxford University Press, 2016. as well as EU economic institutions Thiemann, Matthias. "Growth at risk: Boundary walkers, stylized facts and the legitimacy of countercyclical interventions." Economy and Society 51.4 (2022): 630-654. Krampf, Arie. "Perhaps this time it's different: ideas and interests in shaping international responses to financial crises." Contemporary Politics 21.2 (2015): 179-200. Mugnai, Iacopo. "The politics of ECB’s economic ideas and its implications for European economic governance: embedding a resilient EMU from the top-down?." Comparative European Politics (2022): 1-33. are governed by economists and the field of economics is assumed to be universally shaped by elite US training and prestige markers Fourcade, Marion. "Economists and societies." Economists and Societies. Princeton University Press, 2009, Colander, David C., and David Colander. The making of an economist, redux. Princeton University Press, 2007. in what for sociologists of the profession counts of yet another device of soft US global primacy. Mirowski, Philip, and Dieter Plehwe, eds. The road from Mont Pèlerin: The making of the neoliberal thought collective, with a new preface. Harvard University Press, 2015. But the tendency to expect the hegemony of US-shaped economics in EU institutions has been challenged by sociologists working on EU institutional elites who have instead emphasized the predominantly legal and administrative training of such elites. Lebaron, Frédéric, and Aykiz Dogan. "Do Central Bankers' Biographies Matter?." Sociologica 10.2 (2016): 0-0. This paper aims to adjudicate between these opposing views while addressing common gaps in them. One such gap is that both strands of literature look at individual institutions, mostly the ECB, rather than at variation between them within the crisis management regime. Based on what we know about the institutions in questions from the literature, we would expect that Quadriga institutions whose mandate hinges on constant engagement with financial markets and the elaboration of highly technical policies (such as monetary policy) would be more likely to be steeped in the economics profession. If this is true, then the ECB would be most likely to emphasize advanced training economics in elite (preferably US) due to the high scientization of the ECB as a professional ecology. Mudge, Stephanie L., and Antoine Vauchez. "Fielding supranationalism: the European Central Bank as a field effect." The Sociological Review 64.2_suppl (2016): 146-169. Lebaron, Frédéric and Dogan, Aykiz. “Do Central Bankers’ Biographies Matter?” Sociologica May/August, no. 2 (2016): 1-37; Furthermore, while some scholars see Germany as the architect of the crisis management in 2009-2012, no work in either of the two literatures has been done on whether Germany’s regional “hegemony” also manifested itself through the diffusion of its Ordoliberal brand of economics in the management of EU institutions via training in German (or Swiss) economics departments. Berghahn, Volker, and Brigitte Young. "Reflections on Werner Bonefeld's ‘Freedom and the Strong State: On German Ordoliberalism'and the Continuing Importance of the Ideas of Ordoliberalism to Understand Germany's (Contested) Role in Resolving the Eurozone Crisis." New Political Economy 18.5 (2013): 768-778. Such an expectation can nevertheless be called into question given recent work by Josef Hien showing that ordoliberals’ failure to formalize their approach to economics opened up the space for Anglo-American neoliberalism in German economics training, with Ordoliberalism surviving as a political theory in the bureaucracy and German language law schools, that is in sites least likely to train foreigners. Hien, Josef. "The rise and fall of ordoliberalism." Socio-Economic Review (2023): mwad018. Second, political economy scholarship on the eurocrisis sees EU supranational elites as part of a professional club that moves between the public and the private sectors, with the revolving door movement enabling them to acquire power and influence Kalaitzake, Manolis. "Central banking and financial political power: An investigation into the European Central Bank." Competition & Change 23.3 (2019): 221-244.Van Gunten, Tod S. “Cycles of polarization and settlement”, p. 341. Tsingou, Eleni. "The club rules in global financial governance." The Political Quarterly 85, no. 4 (2014): 417-419. as well as substantial earnings over time. Luechinger, Simon, and Christoph Moser. "The European Commission and the revolving door." European Economic Review 127 (2020): 103461. This line of thinking affirms a C. Wright Mills-like view of power elites who hold “command posts” in European economic governance organizations. Mills C. Wright. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, 1956. Sociological work complements rather than challenge this view by arguing that these elites represent both the power brokers and the cognoscenti within European and even trans-Atlantic policy circles, forming an esteem-based network Baker, Andrew. “Esteem as Professional Currency and Consolidation”. In Professional Networks in Transnational Governance, pp. 149-164. Cambridge University Press, 2017. able to influence European crisis management by intervening into the “governing by panic” Woodruff, David M. "Governing by panic: The politics of the Eurozone crisis." Politics & Society 44.1 (2016): 81-116. of the relations among authorities, creditors, and debtors. Moschella, Manuela. "Negotiating Greece. Layering, insulation, and the design of adjustment programs in the Eurozone." Review of International Political Economy 23.5 (2016): 799-824. Yet, again, neither the political scientists or the sociologists working on this topic have clarified if the revolving doors or the distribution of prestige markers varies across the institutions of the crisis management regime. To fill in this gap, this paper draws on the institutionalist work on mandate constraints to suggest that the Quadriga institutions that are most directly embedded in the workings financial sector such as the ESM, should exhibit more revolving door effects than those that are less so. Finally, we know little about professional heterogeneity in the Quadriga elite based on national characteristics that endure even as translational professional socialization amplified during the past decades. Johnson, Juliet. Priests of prosperity: How central bankers transformed the postcommunist world. Cornell University Press, 2016. Thus, a rich literature tells us that there are strong differences in such national professional elites depending on nation-specific bureaucratic-cultural characteristics, conflicts between political and scientific objectives Kentikelenis, Alexander E., and Leonard Seabrooke. "The politics of world polity: script-writing in international organizations." American Sociological Review 82, no. 5 (2017): 1065-1092. as well as tensions between national technocratic traditions. For example, domestically trained lawyers dominate economics policy institutions in France Vauchez, Antoine. "Une République des avocats fonctionnaires? Enquête aux frontières des espaces politico-administratifs et du barreau d'affaires." Les Cahiers de la Justice 1 (2016): 117-127. or Germany Derlien, Hans‐Ulrich. "Mandarins or managers? The bureaucratic elite in Bonn, 1970 to 1987 and beyond." Governance 16.3 (2003): 401-428. and Anglo-American trained economists dominate them in Spain Ban, Cornel. Ruling ideas: How global neoliberalism goes local. Oxford University Press, 2016. or Italy. Helgadóttir, Oddný. "The Bocconi boys go to Brussels: Italian economic ideas, professional networks and European austerity." Journal of European Public Policy 23.3 (2016): 392-409. Identifying the character and diversity of elites in European economic organizations is important for understanding their sources of power and how they wield influence. As such, the paper challenges the idea that policy elites across Europe have converged towards forms of structuring elite membership that privilege transnational and public-public revolving door professional affiliations. By contrast, we find that the policy elites managing the European economic crisis are a fidelitous crew: they are formed by and come from predominantly national and public rather than transnational and public-private fields of power and prestige. This finding is surprising given the above bias in the literature. Indeed, the only part of the EU that conforms to the conventional argument in political economy is Southern Europe. Indeed, we find little evidence of an elite cohort willing to exploit and control both public and private organizations to exert their influence. Our results show a much more ‘boring’ picture of policy elites that are a stable network group with long-term service to public organizations. Moreover, rather than the global or at least transatlantic “superelite” identified by scholars in other social fields of economic governance, the policy elites in the European CMR were educated in mainly non-elite universities and in terms of their careers two-thirds are bureaucrats with long-standing public service careers. We reflect below on what this means for the study of elites and the common picture of ‘revolving doors’ or transnational elite socialization. The Comparative Field Analysis of Transnational Elites in Command Situations Following John Scott’s call for the renewed study of elites, we locate those “who occupy similar advantaged command situations in the social distribution of authority” within the context of the European crisis management regime. Scott, J. Stratification and power: Structures of class, status and command. Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 42. Such situations are where elites make the most of both organizational and personal networks forms of power to assert their control. An excellent summary of the concept and its application is provided in: Reed, Michael I. "Masters of the universe: Power and elites in organization studies." Organization Studies 33, no. 2 (2012): 203-221. Seabrooke, Leonard, and Lasse Folke Henriksen, eds. Professional networks in transnational governance. Cambridge University Press, 2017. The concept of “command situations” builds on Mills’ notion of “command posts” where his three subgroups of power elites were positioned in the American political economy. Mills, Power Elite. These posts are typically viewed as sitting within bureaucratic structures, but also recently discussed as “traditional centers of societal power… that regulate, oversee, and aim to maintain social order in society and economy, both at regional, nation-state and inter-state levels.” Zald, M. N., & Lounsbury, M. (2010). “The wizards of Oz: Towards an institutional approach to elites, expertise and command posts.” Organization Studies, 31, 963–996, p. 964. Attempts to build a research program around comparative and historical analyses of command posts have emphasized how these posts are enmeshed in broader fields of cultural influences and forms of material exchange. They have also stressed how command posts reflect not a singular elite singing in unison, but are likely to present elites with conflicting logics and interests. Ibid. In a similar line of thinking, scholars have also mapped elite influence in policy planning networks, focusing on how the power elite occupy command posts within countries and across them. In-country studies have located mobility among power elites, such as in the Danish and French cases. Larsen, Anton Grau, and Christoph Houman Ellersgaard. "The inner circle revisited: the case of an egalitarian society." Socio-Economic Review 16, no. 2 (2018): 251-275; Comet, Catherine. "How does the inner circle shape the policy-planning network in France?." Socio-Economic Review (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwx051; Studies across countries have found a “North Atlantic ruling class” that is “at the centre of the process of transnational capitalist class formation”. Carroll, William K., and Jean Philippe Sapinski. “The global corporate elite and the transnational policy-planning network, 1996-2006: A structural analysis”. International Sociology, 25(4) (2010): 501-538, p. 501. Scholars focusing on legal and security regimes have articulated how global governance rules are determined and mediated by “transnational power elite”. Kauppi, Niilo, and Mikael R. Madsen. "Fields of global governance: how transnational power elites can make global governance intelligible." International Political Sociology 8, no. 3 (2014): 324-330; see a range of cases in: Kauppi, Niilo and Mikael R. Madsen, Mikael Rask, eds. Transnational Power Elites: The New Professionals of Governance, Law and Security. Routledge, 2013. Scholarship on ‘revolving doors’ has supported a ‘power elite’ conception of actors who move easily between the public and private sectors, especially by tracing career movements among policy elites in the international standards-making and Anglo-American policy environments. Adolph, Christopher. Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Central Bank Politics: The Myth of Neutrality, Cambridge University Press. 2013; Seabrooke, Leonard, and Eleni Tsingou. "Distinctions, affiliations, and professional knowledge in financial reform expert groups." Journal of European Public Policy 21, no. 3 (2014): 389-407. A great deal of attention has also been paid to the European Union and its bureaucracy, with policy elites identified within the “field of Eurocracy,” Georgakakis, Didier, and Jay Rowell, eds. The Field of Eurocracy: Mapping EU actors and professionals. Springer, 2013. See also: Büttner, Sebastian M., and Steffen Mau. "EU-Professionalismus als transnationales Feld." Berliner Journal für Soziologie 24, no. 2 (2014): 141-167; Georgakakis, Didier. Au service de l’Europe: Crises et transformations sociopolitiques de la fonction publique européenne. Éditions de la Sorbonne, 2019. a field of power this study is much indebted to. The concept of command posts suggests regularity and permanence in how elites are positioned to exert control. To deal with this issue of organizational permanence as well as institutional complexity, the notion of command situations has been developed. Michael Reed has elaborated the concept further, defining it as: ‘command situations’ are complex institutional formations consisting of hierarchically stratified configurations of interorganizational and intraorganizational positions and relations that are shaped and reshaped primarily, but not exclusively, through the offensive and defensive political command strategies deployed by elite groups located at different levels of such configurations. Reed, "Masters of the universe”, p. 210. Such situations have been studied by tracing the characteristics of those involved in bureaucratic settings, especially those established the technocratic and normative basis for policy treatments. One prominent European example is the technocratic underpinning of post-Weimar Germany’s transition into Nazism, in: Aly, G., & Heim, S. Architects of annihilation: Auschwitz and the logic of destruction. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991. We consider our case of the European crisis management regime (CMR) as a “command situation” given its multiple layers of governance, the combination of organizations comprised of regular ‘European institutions’ (ECB, EIB) as well as those formed by law outside the European Community framework (ESM), and a lending programme (EFSI) attached to the bank of the EU (EIB). Based on this literature we see our first task as mapping out the elites within the configurations established for eurocrisis management and compare their characteristics with those predicted by the literature. To this end, we draw on the literature on how elite differentiation is important within systems to maintain credibility among themselves, while a degree of elite unification is important to affirm what is legitimate behavior. To establish what kind of elites have been manning the decks of the European CSR and what organisations they had been steeped in, we build on the comparative field analysis Ban, Cornel, and Bryan Patenaude. "The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund." Public administration 97.3 (2019): 530-545. while narrowing down its focus on cultural capital and institutional capital of the individuals involved as the most important resources attached to elite hierarchy. In this manner we also share an interest with scholars mapping how policy elites are located in “fields” of governance systems. See: Georgakakis, Didier. "The institutionalisation of the European administrative corps as a transnational elite." In Transnational Power Elites, pp. 45-73. Routledge, 2013; More recently see: Georgakakis, Didier, and Frédéric Lebaron. "Yanis (Varoufakis), the Minotaur, and the Field of Eurocracy." Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 43, no. 3 (165 (2018): 216-247. As Bourdieu put it put it in Forms of Capital, this is important because the “social yield of the educational qualification” that constitutes this capital, however well disguised its transmission relative to economic capital, is convertible into other forms of capital, be them material and social. To analyze cultural capital as a transnational resource for the elite unification processes highlighted by Mills and Bourdieu, we mapped the location of CMR elite in the global distribution of educational status resources. This was an imperfect but directly measurable proxy. The findings make it possible to compare the elites of the CMR organizations in terms of their claims to educational status as representatives of a high European technocracy whose work brings them in almost daily interactions with their peers in transatlantic and global institutional contexts. Education with internationally recognizable markers of prestige is a critical elite unification device at the transnational level. Such markers are important to public life as they are to private business careers – and the proliferation of hybrids in-between – highlighted as they are by a widely accepted narrative of “politics of career” in which stepping-stones and ladders among elite circles are recognized. Courpasson, David, and S. Clegg. “Dissolving the iron cages? Tocqueville, Michels, bureaucracy and the perpetuation of elite power.” Organization 13, no. 3 (2006): 319–343. In transnational interactions because it is generally assumed that in economic policymaking one’s educational prestige is a form of power manifested through shared technical languages specific to economics, signaling to markets, and control over issues. Johnson, Priests of Prosperity; Ban, Ruling Ideas. What makes economics distinct is that it is the most hierarchical field in social science, with status attainment in prestigious organizations leading to greater network access to powerful positions. Fourcade, Marion, Etienne Ollion, and Yann Algan. "The superiority of economists." Journal of Economic Perspectives 29, no. 1 (2015): 89-114. Based on these arguments we looked at their highest degree and the university where it was obtained. We ranked their institutional capital in terms of having a PhD degree from elite global universities (high cultural capital), any other degree from elite global universities (medium status capital) and degrees from non-elite academic universities (the low cultural capital of the fidelitous crew). By combining these approaches, we were able to differentiate what types of elites are engaged in the command situations for European crisis management. For institutional capital we inventoried the public or private organizations where this elite worked longer than a year and then used a methodological package (see next section) to map out which organisations provided the most central supply of professional experiences to the CMR elite. Based on the pathbreaking work of Georgakakis and de Lassalle on the European Commission, Georgakakis, Didier, de Lassalle, Marine, 2006: « L’européanisation du personnel politicoadministratif européen : sociographie des directeurs généraux de la Commission européenne », in O. Baisnée et R. Pasquier, L’européanisation des sociétés nationales, Paris, CNRS. First published in English: “Who are the DG ?. Trajectories and carrers of the directors-general of the Commission”, EU consent working papers. Georgakakis, Didier, de Lassalle, Marine, 2007: « Les très hauts fonctionnaires de la Commission européenne : genèse et structure d’un capital institutionnel européen » , Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, n° 166-167, mars 2007, p. 39-53. we define institutional capital as the set of assets that individuals or groups accrue through their engagement with institutions and organizations. This form of capital is characterized by the knowledge, competencies, and connections acquired within formal structures, such as professional associations, private sector firms and bureaucratic organizations. Institutional capital is important because prior employment in influential institutions is a usable resource in the current employment as professionals carry with them networks and knowledge that they can leverage to maximize their power and control. Such markers should not be assumed to be universal but nation-specific. Hartmann’s work distinguishes French, British, and German “styles” of elites. Hartmann, Michael. "Elites and power structure." In Handbook of European Societies, pp. 291-323. Springer, New York, NY, 2010. In Hartmann’s classification of the inter-sectoral mobility of elites the French are known for their common elite education and field promiscuity in moving from the public sector to the private sector. Ibid, p. 295. British elites, by contrast, have coordinated elite education but quite separate elite careers, with less mixing between public and private careers. Finally, elites in Germany’s command posts have no coordinated elite education and have separate elite careers, with little blending between public and private sector careers. There is no particular prestige attached to holding a doctoral degree or being an economist in the higher echelons of economic policy elite power. Hartmann’s work is important in correcting the assumption that American-French experience of elites moving between “revolving doors” and pantouflage is common for other countries. Indeed, Hartmann considers it a transnational Anglophone phenomenon, Ibid, p. 301. a view affirmed by recent work on elite cultures in transnational policy networks. Legrand, Tim. "Elite, exclusive and elusive: transgovernmental policy networks and iterative policy transfer in the Anglosphere." Policy Studies 37, no. 5 (2016): 440-455. Establishing such forms of differentiation of elites in command situations is important for advancing our understanding of which types of elites have influence and control. Data and Methodology Methodologically speaking, recent studies of elites and policy networks have focused on elite interviews Tsingou, ‘Club governance’. or fused social network analysis with more prosopographic methods such as tracing biographies. van Apeldoorn, Bastiaan and de Graaff, Naná. “Corporate elite networks and US post-Cold War grand strategy from Clinton to Obama.” European Journal of International Relations 20, no. 1 (2012): 29-55.. Others have also combined network analysis with more computational prosopographic methods, such as optimal matching sequence analysis, Henriksen, Lasse F. and Seabrooke, Leonard. “Transnational organizing: Issue professionals in environmental sustainability networks.” Organization, 23, no. 5 (2016): 722-741; Seabrooke, Leonard, and Emelie Rebecca Nilsson. "Professional skills in international financial surveillance: assessing change in IMF policy teams." Governance 28, no. 2 (2015): 237-254. or multiple correspondence analysis. Lebaron, Frédéric. "Central bankers in the contemporary global field of power: a ‘social space’ approach." Sociological Review 56, no. 1_suppl (2008): 121-144. We locate 116 elite professionals in the European CSR through a mix of quantitative and qualitative evidence that informs us about both their network position among the organizations studied, their previous affiliations and career experience, as well as their education. As such, our methodological approach opened three fronts: interviews with twelve top management members of the CMR, a network analysis of the past affiliations of all 116 members of the CMR’s executive management bodies and a prosopographic investigation of their training and background. The authors were given extensive access to the EIB, EFSI and ESM in the conduct of a transparency, accountability and integrity audit for a prominent European non-governmental organization, as well as similar materials on the ECB. Our agreement was that any knowledge obtained other than for the formal evaluation belonged to us as researchers. We present some of this information here. We cannot disclose the identity of the NGO at present without identifying the authors possible through a simple Google search. We used this fieldwork to make informed choices about how to design and interpret the descriptive statistical work performed in this paper. In terms of quantitative material, we performed prosopographic analysis on the publicly available CVs of the CMR senior management by coding past affiliations longer than a year and weighted those by the time spent on the job. We also coded their highest educational degree, together with the university where the degree was obtained. Ban, Cornel, Leonard Seabrooke, and Sarah Freitas. "Grey matter in shadow banking: international organizations and expert strategies in global financial governance." Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 6 (2016): 1001-1033. An alternative field-based approach, using Multiple Correspondence Analysis, can be found in Lebaron and Dogan. "Do Central Bankers' Biographies Matter?” The key difference between the two is that a network establishes links between actors in an undetermined social space, while fields are used to distinguish actors from each within a determined social space. To do this, we used LinkedIn Premium, biographical dictionaries and institutional documents in several European languages. This methodological strategy yielded useful descriptive statistics on these elites’ embeddedness in the administrative, economic and political fields. To be able to zoom in and out of the relative positions of the 116 elite technocrats in these fields we performed a descriptive network analysis of the prosopographic data using the Gephi network analysis software. One of the distinctive sources of value added for network analysis is that it identifies the institutional settings that are central to an entire regime such as the European CMR as well as those that are peripheral. Most importantly, through this analysis we can identify the institutions acting as suppliers of professional brokers are understood as social environments that supply senior staff to at least two of the three organizations under analysis. Being a network broker puts one in a position of greater importance relative to single suppliers. Burt, Ronald S. Neighbor networks: Competitive advantage local and personal. Oxford University Press, 2010. The career experiences of the 116 studied provide us with information on their institutional capital. This permits us to establish how tied these elite professionals have been to public and private sector organizations, and how they are networked between organizations. Some institutional settings provide an unusually high number of elite management staff for at least two of the institutions being analyzed. We define expertise brokerage as a positional mechanism that concentrates and provides high value expertise to organizational networks and, as such, it differs from expertise entrepreneurship, a mechanism that assumes more agency than we are willing to assign to brokers. Christopoulos, Dimitrios, and Karin Ingold. "Distinguishing between political brokerage & political entrepreneurship." Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences 10 (2011): 36-42. To put further qualitative flesh on the findings, we zoomed into the biographies of the managing directors of each of the organizations and provided a close comparative reading of their professional trajectories. The empirical sections of the paper examine the senior staff of the key organizations (managing directors and boards of governors and directors) in terms of their institutional capital and status capital, permitting us to locate their experience within the institutional formations the organizations operate in, as well as their personal status from educational attainment. We then look into the particular organizations in more depth, discussing their specific involvement in the European CRM and the links between organizational activities and the composition of their policy elite networks, focusing on affiliations and the “top brass” in leadership positions. But first we wish to establish our conceptual approach. Cultural Capital Movement between prestigious universities known for their economics training and elite positions in policy networks has been well documented. Helgadóttir, Oddný. "The Bocconi boys go to Brussels: Italian economic ideas, professional networks and European austerity." Journal of European Public Policy 23, no. 3 (2016): 392-409. However, in the particular social field of the CMR elite we find little evidence of a transmission belt between the likes of the Chicago School, the Ivy League or elite British institutions to European economic governance organizations. Of the 116 management members coded, only a tenth of the CMR elites can claim education-based high-cultural capital in the economics profession and of these most are in the ECB (7 out of 27 staff), with Southern Europe, the UK and small East European states (Estonia and Slovenia) accounting for the crisis managers with the highest educational prestige (with Greece and Italy at the top of the status pyramid). In contrast, the EIB only has two elite PhDs and the ESM one. Both organizations are dominated by staff with MA or MBA degrees obtained at predominantly national universities, most of them of high local prestige but average to low status in global terms. It can be argued that this may not be a basis for this elite group as a whole to communicate to each other, and to the broader public, that their membership of the European CMR’s circles of influence and power is a legitimate reflection of their educational credentials. Table 1 provides a summary of the educational training for the sample, noting those who were trained in Anglo-Elite universities (Ivy League, Oxbridge, LSE, etc.) and those trained in Anglo Non-Elite universities, following a classification developed by earlier studies of professional training among economic policymakers. Nelson, Stephen C. "Playing favorites: how shared beliefs shape the IMF's lending decisions." International Organization 68, no. 2 (2014): 297-328. See also: Chwieroth, "Professional ties that bind”. Table 1. Educational Training of Elites in Europe’s Crisis Management Regime All Anglo-Elite PhD Anglo Non-Elite PhD Other PhD EIB 52 7 6 39 ECB 39 6 3 17 ESM 21 6 5 15 EFSI 12 1 2 9 Total 116 22 16 78 % 100 18.9 13.8 67.2 A comparison here can be drawn with studies of IMF staff. For policymakers in the IMF 74% of them were trained in Anglo-American universities, compared to 32.7% for our sample. Ibid, online appendix; as well as Kentikelenis and Seabrooke. "The politics of world polity”, p. 1072. Of these, 40% of IMF staff were trained in Anglo-American elite universities compared to 18.9% for the European CRM policy elites. In a series of studies on ECB policy elites, Frédéric Lebaron and colleagues have found a distinct profile of the Euro-central bankers within the European space, with national educational trajectories, persistence of legal (or legal-administrative) studies and a relatively limited exposure to the higher education systems outside their country. Lebaron, Frédéric. “ECB Leaders. A New European Monetary Elite?” In The Field of Eurocracy: Mapping EU Actors and Professionals (pp. 87-104). Palgrave Macmillan, 2013; Lebaron and Dogan, “Do Central Bankers’ Biographies Matter?”; Lebaron, "Central bankers in the contemporary global field of power”. By looking at the case of the senior management we find that this is the case with nearly the entire European CMR higher elite. In short, it can hardly be claimed that the European CMR is a ‘club governance’ model of elites with highly prestigious educational training. Tsingou, “Club Governance”. Institutional Capital To understand what counts as institutional capital in the specific context of the CMR top management, figure 1, below, uses prosopographic data from the CVs of the boards of directors, boards of governors and managing directors of the organizations studied. The data was collected from LinkedIn Premium and was manually coded by two coders who entered and weighted all the professional experience prior to appointment to the extent that it was longer than 2 years, our presumed socialization threshold. To locate more easily the weight of corporate affiliations, we colored them in red. The closer an institutional setting is to one of the four nodes, the more managers came from that institutional setting. As the figures may be difficult to read, we highlight the key results from the network analysis in textual form. The broad finding is that the European CMR is staffed predominantly by the civil servants whose previous professional experiences were shaped by public sector organizations: ministries and central banks, with a smattering of academics and public enterprises. Past corporate affiliations covered about a third of the professional experience “bloc” of this high technocracy, with the ESM accounting for the greatest concentration of senior staff with such a background. Figure 1: Previous affiliations of the European CMR senior staff INSERT MASTER NETWORK ABOUT HERE (see attachment) If we zoom in on the network, we can locate the affiliations of trilateral brokers, or those affiliations that link up three or more of the European economic governance organizations. The composition of these brokers is peculiar when considering common assumptions about elite mobility. There is not a single private organization among them, nor a German organization (public or private). Instead, it is international and supranational organizations (IMF, European Commission, EBRD), which is to be expected, and a handful of national finance ministries of no identifiable pattern (France, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Lithuania, Estonia) that fill in this particular broker field. The only central bank in this social field is that of Portugal. There is not a single former academic institution in this strategic position. The corporate capture hypothesis does not hold for bilateral ties either. There, the densest “traffic” is between the ECB and the ESM, with a handful of Eurozone central banks and finance ministries taking the lion’s share. The only private organization that appears in this category is Goldman Sachs, albeit with less weight than conventionally assumed. McKinsey and KPMG supplied staff to both ESM and EIB management while the only private institution linking the ECB and the EIB is BNP Paribas. One can hardly talk of Franco-American pantouflage at the top of the CMR. Perhaps the most surprising finding here is the scarcity of Bundesbank experiences with bilateral ties. The German Ministry of Finance and the Bundesbank have links to the ECB and the ESM but their weight is not striking compared to their counterparts in the smaller member states. If German hegemony works, it is certainly not via its role as a source of significant experience for the staff at the helm of these two key organizations of the Troika. As for the EIB-ECB bilateral ties, the common nodes are ministries of mostly crisis-ridden countries (Greece, Portugal, Cyprus, Slovenia), with a smattering of mostly non-elite European universities (Urbino, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Athens, Malta). In contrast to the ECB, the EIB governing bodies appear very loosely connected to other organizations in this regard, with no specific organizational supplier enjoying privileged status. One of the main implications of this round of findings is that to the extent that financial capital matters it is not through placing its former managers in the most strategic positions of the European CMR. Elites in the CRM who have significant private sector experience are barely a third of the total. Moreover, less than half of those with a corporate past comes from the financial sector, that is precisely the sector of capital that has had the most at stake in the management of the eurozone crisis. What this leaves us with is with Pepper Culpepper’s hypothesis that capital matters through either its quiet structural power (public power adopts the preferences of capital out of fear of capital outflows and, at best, non-cooperation) or its instrumental power (lobbying). Culpepper, Pepper D. Capitalism, institutions, and power in the study of business. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. The findings also highlight important socio-morphological differences between the CMR top brass and the profile of technocrats in the Commission. Unlike the latter, the CMR elite is not strong of having a privileged relation to Europe as gauged by the education and professional experiences accumulated in countries other than one’s home country. Surely, the prior connection with European or international institutions is very important, yet domestic experiences dominate. Our interviews suggest that this has to do with the fact that while the Commission technocrats must pass a tests that spans two years (the famous concours) and socializes them into the myths of meritocracy, competence, European-ness and so on, Georgakakis, Didier. "Tensions within Eurocracy? A socio-morphological view." French Politics 8.2 (2010): 116-144. the selection of the top brass is a more political process and therefore the member states angle to secure appointments steeped into domestic socialization processes and domestic status markers. To assess if our characterization of fidelity among policy elites with long careers rings true we now turn to examine the individual organization’s top management and the persons at the very top of the command posts: the managing directors. The reason for letting this individual level of analysis complement the social network picture is that this would permit us to filter out those who have authoritative and allocative powers rather than those lower in the hierarchy who provide support functions to those above. Scott, “Modes of power”. As the sociological literature in the field of Eurocracy shows, while the men and women at the top of European bureaucratic structures (such as the Director Generals in the Commission) are invested with extremely high levels of de facto executive power, to acquire and maintain that power they need to espouse career sequences that highlight internationally dynamic rather than nationally fidelitous commitments, claim international high status markers and boast professional experience in the private sector of foreign countries, with all of this weakening the perception that they are excessively socialized into the home country and its interests rather than embody the sense of one being “top servants of Europe.” Georgakakis, Didier. "Tensions within Eurocracy? A socio-morphological view." French Politics 8.2 (2010), p.124. To examine this, we look further at the leaders of the individual organizations in the European CRM, with a focus on the managing directors. Let’s consider first the case of the ECB, this primus inter pares of Europe’s financial and macroeconomic CMR. Elites in the European Central Bank The ECB is by far the key player in the CMR thanks to its role as lender of last resort. In times of deep financial crises (financial panics, contagious bank runs and other unusual increases in demand for liquidity that cannot be met from the market), a bank or the financial system as a whole may find themselves unable to obtain sufficient financial liquidity to continue their operations. To deal with these challenges one needs a public provider of liquidity to the financial institutions that find themselves in such moments of distress. This provider is known as a lender of last resort (LoLR) able to deliver liquidity “to illiquid but most likely solvent counterparties on whatever terms” Buiter, Willem H., and Ebrahim Rahbari. (2012), "The ECB as lender of last resort for sovereigns in the euro area" p.8 To be credible, the LoLR needs to “be able to issue unquestionably liquid instruments in any amount and on demand – that is, without delay; at a minimum, a credible LoLR should be able to cover the plausible liquidity needs of the agents that are potentially vulnerable to a funding strike by private investors.” Ibid p. 21 As a vast literature showed, after years of damaging hesitation, this precisely what the ECB when Mario Draghi famously promised to backstop all forms of sovereign debt in the Euro area. Sandbu, Martin. Europe’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt-New Edition. Princeton University Press, 2017; Schelkle, Waltraud. The Political Economy of Monetary Solidarity: Understanding the Euro Experiment. Oxford University Press, 2017; Schmidt, Vivien A. “Reinterpreting the Rules ‘by Stealth’in Times of Crisis: A Discursive Institutionalist Analysis of the European Central Bank and the European Commission.” West European Politics 39, no. 5 (2016): 1032–1052; Thiemann, Matthias. The Growth of Shadow Banking: A Comparative Institutional Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 2018; Tooze, Adam. “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” London: Allen Lane, 2018. The same ECB acted as enforcer of austerity in Greece when it made explicit threats of withholding emergency liquidity assistance to Greek banks if the Greek government did not comply with the demands of the Quadriga. What kind of management elite carried such vast operations of rescue and punishment? The figure below provides the requisite bird’s eye view of the dominant and the peripheral professional experiences that constitute the profile of this command post. Figure 3: ECB management The most important pattern s that bulk of the ECB’s senior staff are a mix of international technocrats (with the IMF, European Commission and the BIS as the most important ones), national technocrats from central banks and financial supervisory bodies as well as academia. There is no German dominance here either, with the federal financial supervisor and the Chancellery showing an identical weight in the network with East European central banks. Moreover, the surplus economies that according to the literature cited above have adjudicated debates on crisis management in the European Council (Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland) are far from dominating this elite field either. Two non-euro central banks (the US Fed and the Swedish central bank) loom larger than those of Germany and its presumed allies. Private financial entities are not inconsequential in the supply of senior management to the ECB yet only two are entities of systemic importance (Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas), with the bulk holding previous posts in national corporations whose names would not make it into the pages of any international financial newspaper, let alone be a market maker in European finance. Of the three main organizations in the CMR, the ECB seems to be most appreciative of academic experiences. That said, there is no Ivy League or European super-elite academic clique here. Instead, a handful of staff with academic pasts at Harvard, Columbia, Oxford, or the LSE share the scene with staff leaving behind academic posts in nationally prominent but internationally lesser known universities. As the crisis deepened and in order to bypass existing political constraints, the EU began to add new public financial actors both within and outside its constitutional infrastructure: a financial support fund for sovereigns (the European Stability Mechanism) and an unorthodox countercyclical fund (the European Fund for Strategic Investments). It is to the analysis of their elite backgrounds that the study turns to next. Elites in the European Stability Mechanism An understudied yet extremely powerful organization, the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) is an intergovernmental organization established in 2012 as a permanent bond market support mechanism (“bailout fund” in popular language) for the Eurozone. As such, it is deeply embedded in the Eurozone governance architecture. Smeets, Sandrino, Alenka Jaschke, and Derek Beach. "The Role of the EU Institutions in Establishing the European Stability Mechanism: Institutional Leadership under a Veil of Intergovernmentalism." JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies (2019). At the height of the crisis, in 2012, funding was insufficient to address all critical needs in the Eurozone, with emergency funds for Greece, Ireland, and Portugal in play, while Italy and Spain wobbled without dedicated support. The establishment of the ESM mobilized funding and provided stability support under strict conditionality to the benefit of contracting Member States experiencing, or being threatened by severe financing problems. Recital 7 ESM Treaty. The scope of the ESM interventions included macroeconomic loans (the most used with Greece, Portugal and Ireland), primary and secondary market purchases (developed but never used), precautionary programs a la IMF (developed but not used), as well as direct and indirect bank recapitalization assistance (the latter was used for Spain). Like the IMF and other peer organizations, the ESM is a shareholder-dominated organization. Its highest governing body (the Board of Governors or BoG) is composed of the Euro Area finance ministers and its Board of Directors (BoD) reports to the BoG, with each Governor appointing a Director in the Board. Like the Fiscal Compact, the ESM Treaty is the latest iteration in the EU’s experimentation with a reinforced intergovernmentalism that gives greater authority to domestic level technocrats than the IMF, its peer international organization. Bickerton, Christopher J., Hodson, Dermot and Puetter, Uwe. "The New Intergovernmentalism: European Integration in the Post‐Maastricht Era." JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 53, no. 4 (2015): 703-722. Legally speaking, the ESM is an entity that emanates from the sovereign will of the Member States and delegates critical forms of intervention in the domestic policy arena of the program countries to the Commission and the ECB. In effect, through the ESM, the EU created a public financial company controlled by the informal consensus of the ministers of finance of the Eurozone but which leaves the adjustment program design (the Memoranda of Understanding) and their enforcement to the Commission, the ECB and the IMF (the so-called Troika/the Institutions). The “Quadriga”, with the ESM included, is therefore a good example of a “command situation” in action. Howarth, David, and Aneta Spendzharova. "Accountability in Post‐Crisis Eurozone Governance: The Tricky Case of the European Stability Mechanism." JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies (2019). Some would expect that as an organization controlled by the economic technocracies of the Eurozone’s member states, the ESM’s higher echelons would be controlled by people deeply rooted into ministry of finance and central bank backgrounds. This is not the case, however, and the ESM management appears to be tied more closely to global financial capital than either the ECB or the EIB. Slightly more than half of the total affiliations (including those serving as trilateral brokers) are from private finance, with global financial firms (Credit Suisse, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, RBS, Allianz, Morgan Stanley, ING) looming large alongside global accounting firms (KPMG, PWC). Our interviews with ESM staff highlighted the internal perception that since the mandate of the ESM is to act as a supplementary lender of last resort to sovereigns in distress, the practice of hiring such staff at the highest levels is in line with the reasons for the IMF’s own turn to the financial sector: to better understand the baroque complexities of the ordinary banking and shadow banking organizations and activities that have reshaped sovereign debt markets in the era of financialization. Ban, Cornel, Leonard Seabrooke, and Sarah Freitas. "Grey matter in shadow banking: international organizations and expert strategies in global financial governance." Review of International Political Economy 23, no. 6 (2016): 1001-1033. Contrary to the expectation that an intergovernmental organization acting as the curator of the memoranda of understadanding with the states in default, the ESM would be staffed by elites shaped by professional experiences in the “core” creditor coalition around Germany. This does not appear to be the case at all, with central bank and ministry of finance pasts distributed relatively evenly between debtor and creditor countries. However, unlike the ECB, the ESM senior management has little to do with previous academic careers in general and does not have a single elite global university present in the elite field. Figure 4: ESM management Elites in the European Investment Bank Established in 1957, the EIB is one of the first organizations of the EU and it looms large in global finance as the world’s largest public multilateral bank. The EIB spent sixty years providing “stable, low-cost, long-term financing to implement a development strategy, either on its own or jointly with the private sector”. Griffith-Jones, Stephany, and Judith Tyson. The European Investment Bank: Lessons for Developing Countries. No. 2013/019. WIDER Working Paper, 2013. That strategy was to provide the financing conditions to poorer EU member states to achieve income convergence between countries and regions within the union and buffer the shocks resulting from the trade liberalization measures that created the common market. Other social purposes were grafted onto this primary and original one, from promoting renewable energy (including radically low carbon innovations) to boosting employment friendly growth. Also, via its European Investment Fund, the EIB has become Europe’s largest venture capitalist, a development that reflected growing European anxieties about global competitive pressures in an environment where private venture capital was much weaker relative to the US. Mertens, Daniel, and Matthias Thiemann. "Building a hidden investment state? The European Investment Bank, national development banks and European economic governance." Journal of European public policy 26.1 (2019): 23-43. It was only in the depth of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 that growth and employment trumped other goals. During that period the EIB boosted its lending by 65% with the specific intent to boost growth and employment in Europe (from €47.8 billion in 2007 to €57.6 billion in 2008, and to €79.1 billion in 2009. Griffith-Jones and Tyson, The European Investment Bank. Following a slow recovery from a deep economic crisis, the EIB received two capital increases, emerging as a central actor in delivering much-needed investment to the European economy, which remains below pre-crisis levels. More recently scholars began to note that the EIB did this as part of a broader EU strategy to increase countercyclical investment firepower via a network of domestic national development banks having the EIB as the central node. The EIB’s role was further boosted in 2014, when this bank was chosen to deliver President Juncker’s landmark investment initiative, the European Fund for Strategic Investments (EFSI), which the Commission recently declared a success and doubled in time and money. Set under the EIB umbrella, The bulk of the EFSI’s daily operations such as information gathering on projects, due diligence, informing EFSI governing bodies about the applicability of the EFSI guarantee, are run by EIB staff. Author interviews with the EFSI Investment Committee staff. August 2016. the EFSI went fully operational in 2015 as part of the Investment Plan for Europe (the so-called “Juncker Plan”). EFSI was designed to make it easier for European businesses to obtain funds from the EIB, via its guarantees and loans, that they would not been able to access otherwise. The rise of centrifugal political forces in Europe against the background of a weak recovery with very poor hiring figures bolstered the case for an additional EU-level countercyclical fund. This was, then, a countercyclical lender that increased lending in recessions and weak growth economic cycles, when private banks retreated as well as a public venture capitalist for high-risk special activities that must be “additional” in not having received funding from the EIB. Author interviews with senior EFSI staff, August 2016. It is important to emphasize that when one looks at the details of EFSI mandate and actual lending, this fund appears not as a traditional counter-cyclical fund but as a hybrid between such a fund and as a vehicle focused on promoting long term investment, with key competitiveness enhancing items as part of the portfolio. Still, given its critical importance and initial success in reaching the pre-set targets in terms of speedy take-up of investment volumes, the Commission decided in September 2016 to double its duration and financial firepower, extending the EFSI until 2020 and mobilize €500 billion by 2020 with the help of EU budget and EIB guarantees amounting €33.5 billion. Figure 7: EIB and EFSI management As to the composition of policy elites, the EIB confirms only in part the expectation that its managerial elite is drawn strictly from bureaucracies. Most of the staff originates in national economic ministries, regulatory commissions, planning bodies, public pension funds, welfare agencies and development agencies, with only a handful of universities of average status in the trail of these elites. As in the case of the ECB, there is a very close professional connection to the European Commission, the IMF and OECD, yet without the disproportionately high density of ties that the ECB had with these international institutions. While corporates supply about a fourth of past professional affiliations, these corporates tend to be non-financial firms. Indeed, unlike the ECB and the ESM, the EIB elite cannot claim a single financial institution of global significance in its block of experiences. As for the management bodies of the Juncker Plan (EFSI), their staff comes predominantly from the private sector, with the French and Spanish Finance ministries covering the rest. We find that calls for the emergence of a new “European investment state” are not overblown and that composition of policy elites is important in providing a stable network of long-term public service careers, with private sector experience used for investment and repayment concerns. Mertens and Thiemann, "Market-based but state-led”. Far from a transnational elite using revolving doors to dominate European crisis management, or a German-led ordoliberal technocracy, policy elites in the European CRM are characterized by their fidelity rather than their fickleness. Conclusion Our concern in this paper has been to map the policy elite in the European crisis management regime and how they handled their “command situation” from different positions of cultural and institutional capital accumulated and converted over time. This command situation required a range of organizations, including those responsible for imposing austerity measures and establishing conditionality criteria for countries in need, as well as investment and lending to spur economic activity. The main purpose of the simplified comparative field analysis practiced here is to better understand the cultural and institutional resources policy elites handles these command situations underpinning the Eurozone crisis. Rather than focusing only on austerity measures and the severity of costs imposed by the “Troika” or “Quadriga” on program countries, we have highlighted important additions to the narrative of European economic crisis management. One important addition here is that since 2013 the eurozone (albeit not the EU as a whole) acquired (however partially) a lender of last resort function for sovereigns via the ESM in partnership with ECB. Ban, Cornel. "The Economic and Monetary Union: How Did the Euro Area Get a Lender of Last Resort?." Governance and politics in the post-crisis European Union 179 (2020). Ban, Cornel. "Central banking in pandemic times." Global Perspectives 2.1 (2021): 24188. Hu, Kun. "The institutional innovation of the lender of last resort facility in the Eurozone." Journal of European Integration 36.7 (2014): 627-640. Braun, Benjamin. "Central banking and the infrastructural power of finance: The case of ECB support for repo and securitization markets." Socio-economic review 18.2 (2020): 395-418. Braun, Benjamin, et al. "Between governability and legitimacy: The ECB and structural reforms." SocArXiv. (2021). This supranational organization imposed, and intellectually legitimated, pressures for pro-cyclical fiscal policies on countries facing sovereign debt issues that are in excess of those demanded by the IMF. Ban, Cornel, and Bryan Patenaude. "The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund." Public administration 97.3 (2019): 530-545. Lütz, Susanne, and Matthias Kranke. "The European rescue of the Washington Consensus? EU and IMF lending to Central and Eastern European countries." Review of International Political Economy 21.2 (2014): 310-338. This bias was also partially corrected through the restructuring of loans to permit lower interest rates and longer maturities, arguably providing more fiscal space to program countries in the medium and long run. Moreover, since 2015 the CMR also acquired a “Keynesian” component in the shape of a countercyclical lending fund (EFSI) that boosted the existing countercyclical functions of the EIB, however evenly. Although further research is needed to map out careers over time, the findings of the paper challenge the strong argument that given its origins in the bailout of private banks lending to high deficit countries, austerity could be somehow directly related to technocratic elites being steeped into private finance as its former managers. While corporate links are significant forms of institutional capital in a highly financialized bond market, they are by no means dominant. This finding does not deny that private finance played a structural role in this outcome via its ramifications in the politics of the powerful member states. It only raises the bar regarding the standards of evidence for arguments that seek to trace the instrumental power of capital into interlocutors who are sympathetic to financial capital’s interests by virtue of their former jobs. On finance and inaction see: Woll, Cornelia. "Politics in the interest of capital: A not-so-organized combat." Politics & Society 44, no. 3 (2016): 373-391. Comparative political economy research is particular important here in telling why French or American or other national types of financial systems are more likely to be involved in capture. Culpepper, Pepper D., and Raphael Reinke. "Structural power and bank bailouts in the United Kingdom and the United States." Politics & Society 42, no. 4 (2014): 427-454. Our evidence confirms that the “Keynesian” arm of the EU is one dominated by technocrats with domestic careers rather than those associated with previous careers in finance. Importantly, across the entire CMR we found no strong evidence for German influence, with no non-German CMR elites being linked to German organizations (or degrees). Finally, tracing the careers and educational attainment of policy elites also allowed us to assess if they are trained in a similar manner to well-established cases of transnational socialization. The CMR elite are far from being an exhibit for the argument that the European technocracy draws its prestige not only from its skills but from its advanced degrees. The evidence is clear: such high-status degrees are only a small part of this elite world. Even though the ECB seems the higher prestige group, the share of highly ranked PhDs of the ECB senior staff is much lower than one would expect, and certainly much lower than comparable organizations such as the IMF. Ban, Cornel, and Bryan Patenaude. "The professional politics of the austerity debate: A comparative field analysis of the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund." Public administration 97.3 (2019): 530-545. Chwieroth, Jeffrey M. "Testing and measuring the role of ideas: The case of neoliberalism in the International Monetary Fund." International Studies Quarterly 51.1 (2007): 5-30. Overall, our tracing of the cultural capital and institutional capital of CMR elites suggests that they have mainly conventional careers, mainly with long periods in public service. While the leaders at the apex of the CRM organizations do reflect a transnational power elite with Ivy League economics training and mobility between high-end positions in supranational organizations and private international banks, they are the exception. To recall John Scott’s types of elites noted above, they may be those who hold explicit authoritative elite power, but they are not primarily engaged in establishing the expert-driven content of the CMR, which falls to other policy elites within the command situation and determines how programs are managed. This includes the allocation of resources such as repayment schedules and investment plans. In general, suggest that policy elites in the European CMR demonstrate ‘fidelity’ in sticking to their careers and providing a stable network from which to manage a response to economic crisis. This image of elites is considerably different from the typical one that stresses the importance of ‘revolving doors’ and transnational socialization in the promotion of neoliberal economic ideas and reforms. Coman, Ramona. "Transnational economists in the Eurozone crisis: Professional structures, networks and ideas." New political economy 25.6 (2020): 978-991. Seabrooke, Leonard, and Eleni Tsingou. "Revolving doors in international financial governance." Global Networks 21.2 (2021): 294-319. Helgadóttir, Oddný, and Cornel Ban. "Managing macroeconomic neoliberalism: capital and the resilience of the rational expectations assumption since the Great Recession." New political economy 26.5 (2021): 869-884. Seabrooke, Leonard, and Ole Jacob Sending. "Consultancies in public administration." Public Administration 100.3 (2022): 457-471. Babb, Sarah, and Alexander Kentikelenis. "Markets everywhere: The Washington consensus and the sociology of global institutional change." Annual Review of Sociology 47.1 (2021): 521-541. While we are well aware that the elites studied here are not challengers to contemporary capitalism, and that they actively or passively support power asymmetries in the European political economy. Still, knowing their character and composition is important for understanding the political and technocratic realm of possibilities. It is especially important to know that the majority of senior managers reflect a stable quorum. They are potentially those who could provide the environment for change following new ideas, when, as Peter Hall states, “policy is superintended by experts or by administrators with long tenures in office”. Hall, Peter A. "Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: the case of economic policymaking in Britain." Comparative Politics 25, no. 3 (1993): 275-296, at 291. Our mapping exercise suggest that the view of power elites moving easily between public and private sectors should be modified when it comes to European economic governance organizations. This image applies only to the very top leadership positions. As noted, the common view of power elites is largely based on the American and French experiences, and is not reflected in many European countries that the supply the organizations under study here. One could state, if we are bold, that there is an older error of conceptual misplacement working in reverse here. The American reception of the Mills’ Power Elite criticized the book for importing European elite experiences to an U.S. context where it was not appropriate and held little analytical leverage. Daniel Bell and Talcott Parsons both judged that Mills’ conception of honor and prestige among the U.S. power elite was derived from a conception of deference that was drawn from the European experience, and not apparent in 1950s America. Bell, Daniel. "The power elite-reconsidered." American Journal of Sociology 64, no. 3 (1958): 238-250, p. 244; Parsons, Talcott. "The distribution of power in American society." World Politics 10, no. 1 (1957): 123-143, p. 137. For them power elites in the U.S. were not entrapped in a European conception of celebrity-like leadership, and they were more likely to be concentrated through socialization in Ivy League universities. Furthermore, Robert Dahl objected that Mills’ criteria for a ruling elite was too vague, and that in the absence of clear criteria one could not simply assume that elites were in control in the United States of America. See: Dahl, Robert A. "A critique of the ruling elite model." American Political Science Review 52, no. 2 (1958): 463-469. Many decades later this same criticism of misplaced assumptions can be made in how we understand the European policy elite. Applying an understanding of power elite positioning that is strongly associated with the American “revolving door” and French pantoflauge of elite mobility and organizational promiscuity misses the real character of policy elites in the command situation of European conflict management. Finally, we have appealed to the idea of developing methodological applications to understand dynamics within “command situations”. Michael Reed has called for methodological developments that can study both “positional elites” and “action elites” rather than relying on studying either the structure of elite replication or elites’ actual behavior. Reed, "Masters of the universe”, p. 210. Identifying both positions and actions from elites is crucial in providing detail on how command situations play out in practice. We hope our mapping the institutional and status capital of elites contributes to the study of command situations. We also hope that our initial step is useful in readdressing key assumptions about elite behavior in economic governance organizations and how crisis management may benefit from occupational fidelity. While this paper’s sociological approaches to the economy connected social networks and institutions as critical social structures, it leaves it to future scholarship to address the third element of the integrated triptych of the social structuring of economic governance drawn in organizational studies by Jens Beckert: Beckert, Jens. "How do fields change? cognitive frames. Capturing the complementarities and contradictions of these different social structures can better illuminate how actors employ resources accumulated in one of these structures in the economic governance field to reconfigure other parts of the social structure in a way favorable to their goals. Finally, the scope of this research could be furthered by integrating ethnographic observation and multiple correspondence analysis with sociological theory in the vein practiced recently by Frederic Lebaron and Didier Georgakakis when studying the elite field of Eurocracy. Georgakakis, Didier, and Jay Rowell, eds. The field of eurocracy: Mapping EU actors and professionals. Springer, 2013; Georgakakis, Didier, and Frédéric Lebaron. "Yanis (Varoufakis), the Minotaur, and the Field of Eurocracy." Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung 43.3 (165 (2018): 216-247. 47 47