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2 Eur. L. Open 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/eurlwop2 and id is 1 raw text is: European Law Open (2023), 2, 1-7 CAMBRIDGE doi:10.1017 e1o.2023.22 LNIVE PRESS L Marco Dani University of Trento, Trento, Italy Email: marco.dani@unitn.it Experimented in the interwar period' and established in the aftermath of World War II, activist government consolidated in Europe as a successful form of political rule during les trente gloriouses,2 owing to its commitment to industrial modernisation, macroeconomic stabilisation and redistribution.3 Both the success and the decline of that idea are entwined with the process of European integration. If activist government could evolve and spread in the first two decades after World War II, it was due in no small part to the enabling capacity of the European Economic Communities.4 Likewise, if it was discredited and weakened as from the late 1970s, much of the blame can be attributed to the constraining capacity of the EU treaties and their predisposition to tame state activism.' Especially after the Treaty of Maastricht, activist government came to be seen as a thing of the past destined to be gradually scaled down and replaced with the regulatory state,6 a new form of political rule definitely more attuned to the predominant neoliberal Zeitgeist. Its fortunes were ever more on the wane during the Euro-crisis, when the combination of EU muddling-through and austerity policies seemed to put an end to that once venerable idea and its promise of economic security and emancipation. And yet with the COVID-19 pandemic, activist government made an unexpected return: the need to finance health care systems, to shore up large sectors of national economies and to sustain workers during lock-downs required massive state interventions and favoured the rediscovery of tools and policies that until recently had seemed obsolete. Again, even in this revival of state activism EU institutions were deeply involved. In the context framed by the EU treaties, most state interventions would not have been possible without the imprimatur or active contribution of the Union. Indeed, state interventionism was unleashed by 'Activist policies came to the fore with particular intensity after the financial crash of 1929, and were not the preserve of liberal and democratic regimes, as Fascism, Nazism and, of course, the Soviet Union were all deeply involved in the experiment. However, especially after World War II, the Weimar and New Deal experiences were seen as forerunners, see M Goldmann and AJ Menendez, 'Weimar Moments: Transformations of the Democratic, Social, and Open State of Law' (2022) Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law Research Paper No 2022-12, and KK Patel, The New Deal: A Global History (Princeton University Press 2016). 2J Fourasti&, Les Trente Glorieuses ou la revolution invisible (Hachette 2004). 3G Majone, 'From the Positive to the Regulatory State: Causes and Consequences of Changes in the Mode of Governance' 17 (1997) Journal of Public Policy, 139-167. 4A Milward, The European Rescue of the Nation-State (Routledge 2000). SA Mody, Euro Tragedy. A Drama in Nine Acts (Oxford University Press 2018). 6Majone (n 3). © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bv/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

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