Description
This article critically analyses the increasing involvement of EU fiscal governance in public health through the ‘European Semester’ fiscal coordination tool. The European Commission (EC) has a commitment to mainstreaming health in non-health policy areas, in line with the ‘Health in All Policies’ (HiAP) concept. However, this article argues that HiAP is a chameleonic idea. This means that its (intentional) level of vagueness may lead to counterproductive consequences. In the current context of the establishment of the new ‘European Social Fund+’ (ESF+), one such counterproductive effect suspected is that HiAP language can be used to justify gradually watering down the EU’s consideration for public health. This article evaluates the legitimacy of this suspicion drawing on two analytical tools: first it uses the concept of ‘constitutional asymmetry’ to analyse the relationship between the European Semester and the ESF+. This section highlights the EC agenda to increasingly streamline overarching EC priorities, rather than prioritising health per se. The article then draws on discourse analysis to explain how this constitutional asymmetry is discursively supported and reinforced in the area of public health.
