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The European Central Bank (ECB) emerged from the sovereign debt crisis as one of the most powerful supranational institutions. Against this background, this article explains how and why the ECB became empowered during the euro area crisis. Building on the delegation, governor's dilemma, and epistemic community approaches, we argue that the ECB ability to play a strong role in this empowerment process and to convince member states to entrust it with more competences was the outcome of a combination of three factors: limited cohesiveness within the collective principal (Eurogroup); a fiduciary relationship characterized by broad discretion and independence on the trustee side (ECB); and strong specialization with the ECB acting as epistemic entrepreneur. We illustrate our argument with two cases: the Trichet letters exemplify an autonomous emergency empowerment and the introduction of the single supervisory mechanism demonstrates ECB influence on institutional design decisions in negotiating processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'post-functionalist' view that growing politicisation constrains further integration ('constraining dissensus') occupies a prominent place in contemporary European studies. However, in the case of the euro crisis, we observe a rise in contentious politics concomitant with a deepening of EU integration, namely in the areas of economic governance. This paper argues that the intervention of the 'Troika' in the struggles over the framing of the southern European crises is a key to this puzzle. The analysis of over 1200 public declarations produced by the three institutions from 2009 to 2016 shows that the Troika actively 'responded' to processes of heightened politicisation, reproducing the dominant crisis narrative of the southern European periphery and making the case for the adequacy and inevitability of austerity. The Troika's success in framing the euro crisis as a result of domestic failure and moral hazard contributed to the legitimation of further integration of European economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Incorporating a feminist analytical framework, we examine, from a longitudinal and generational perspective, public support for European Monetary Union. Feminist critiques of EMU argue that narratives around the adoption of the euro, the impacts of austerity, as well as the economic recovery have to a large extent ignored women's experiences. In light of these critiques, we examine the empirical evidence indicating growing support for EMU even after the crisis. Specifically, we examine how women's experience as participants in the labour force, as well as in the household, influence their support for the euro. We find that the youngest cohorts had significant declines in support post crisis but that the gender gap in support is smaller where labour force experiences are more similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the start of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), the ECB's sui generis nature as one of the most independent central banks of an entity lacking political union evoked concerns that it would be both too constrained (limited mandate) and enjoy too much discretion (limited ex-post accountability) in comparison to central banks like the US Federal Reserve. Were these concerns justified? Using a principal-agent framework, this contribution contrasts the ECB with the Federal Reserve in their reactions to the global financial crisis and how the available accountability mechanisms were used. Early concerns that the ECB would pursue only price stability at the expense of other economic objectives were exaggerated, though criticism about its accountability proved prescient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretations of the nature of integration since the outbreak of the euro crisis differ greatly. Either observers see a full restoration of national control or they find a substantial upgrade of supranational autonomy. In light of these contradicting perspectives, this article searches for general patterns of crisis-driven integration. To this end, it analyses the key institutions of the reformed European economic governance. The findings show that control over risk-reducing and market-making institutions have been delegated to supranational institutions whereas control over all risk-sharing and market-correcting institutions has remained in the hands of the member states. This pattern of pooling and delegation of competences reflects the superior bargaining power of creditor states during the crisis. As a consequence, crisis-driven integration has deepened the structural asymmetry between market-making and market-correcting of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of crisis, political leaders are torn between calls for strong leadership and the need to maintain their license to operate amongst their constituents. The predicament of European Heads of State and Government (HSG) during crises provides a particularly strong example of this. For on top of the inherent tension between political leadership and democracy, in the European multi-level system, HSG have to balance the demands of many groups of potential followers while facing weak and contradictory vectors of legitimate leadership. This contribution presents a framework by which the inherent tensions of legitimate European leadership may systematically be assessed. It applies this framework to two HSG that were key to the management of the euro crisis, the German chancellor Angela Merkel and the Greek Prime Minister Tsipras in their attempts to walk the tightrope between legitimate and decisive EU leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sovereign debt restructuring played a key role in placing the US federal government on a sound financial footing under its new Constitution in 1789. State governments in the US, like national governments in the euro area, do not have bankruptcy protection. US state governments have not defaulted since the Great Depression, owing to a credible no-bailout policy by the federal government coupled with fiscal rules and an effective signalling of default risk by private markets. At the municipal level in the US, bankruptcy protections apply and recent default experience is very low. With permanent sovereign bailout mechanisms in place in the euro area, sovereign bankruptcy provisions might lessen officially induced moral hazard, allowing market discipline to function more effectively with respect to euro area countries than previously. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article builds on the analysis of institutional change in the European Union as projected by two closely related approaches: deliberative and new intergovernmentalism. Consensus and deliberation play a pivotal role within these perspectives. The two concepts are seen as key for understanding institutional change within the European Council and Council environment. Euro crisis decision-making, which by several authors is seen as evidence of either hard intergovernmental bargaining or as a transformation of consensus politics into domination, thus may undermine a core assumption of the new intergovernmentalism. Even though persisting asymmetries between creditor and debtor countries and dominance on part of one or a small number of powerful member states are understood as a threat to consensus politics, the euro crisis is not seen to have fundamentally changed the overall role of consensus and deliberation as a defining feature of the post-Maastricht era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After clarifying the concept of intergovernmental union, the article analyses the performance of the latter during the euro crisis. The economic policy side of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) epitomises the intergovernmental union because based on the principle of voluntary coordination between member state governments as a condition for advancing the process of integration. Tested during the euro crisis, because of the distrust emerged between member states, EMU has ended up in creating a highly centralised policy regime, where the creditor member states have come to play a domineering role with regard to debtor member states. Hierarchical relations between national governments have finally substituted consensus with domination. The absence of a European legislative check on the decisions taken by the intergovernmental Euro Summit and Eurogroup has made domination an unjustifiable feature in the eyes of the public opinion of the debtor member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurozone crisis resulted in a decisive change of Europe’s fiscal surveillance regime that brought the question of public finance oversight sharply into focus. The Stability and Growth Pact, the fiscal cornerstone of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), was fortified, expanded and supplemented by the so-called ‘Six Pack’, the ‘Fiscal Compact’ and the ‘Two Pack’. These substantial initiatives all aimed at strengthening the credibility and enforceability of the EMU’s rules-based economic coordination regime through further formal competence transfer and an improvement of the EU’s problem-solving capacity. This article explains that from a process perspective, their adoption showed an ability of the EU polity to produce agreement and find a way out of its chronic institutional paralysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt’s sophisticated comment on our analysis of the European Commission’s role in economic governance notwithstanding, we stand by our conclusion that the Commission emerges as an ‘unexpected winner’ from the current crisis. It wins by significantly gaining competences in absolute terms — and unexpectedly so, given the constant murmur about the Commission being in decline. We agree, however, that further research is needed to fully grasp the complex institutional implications of the still ongoing crisis for the Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protracted euro area crisis has led to a resurgence of academic interest in integration theories. In a recent piece in this journal, Bauer and Becker argue that the euro crisis allowed the European Commission to strengthen its role in economic governance, in particular with regard to its implementation powers. Contrary to Bauer and Becker’s claim, I contend that the euro crisis has resulted not in strengthening the Commission. Rather, the Commission is undergoing “subtle disempowerment”, that is, a gradual transfer of decision-making authority and resources from the Commission to the intergovernmental level and to the European Central Bank. I illustrate the Commission's subtle disempowerment along three dimensions: the creation of the intergovernmental European Stability Mechanism; enhanced oversight mechanisms of the Commission via the troika constellation; and the creation of the European System of Financial Supervision, Banking Union and Single Supervisory Mechanism under the aegis of the European Central Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European crisis has many causes. Worse, the different causes are mutually reinforcing. National economies lost competitiveness within the single currency, governments and households lived beyond their means, banks and other financial firms moved capital across borders and then called it back home again in a fit of panic. Europe is suffering as a consequence. European policy-making is suffering as well. With so many ‘causes’, politicians are dividing their attention across different and at times competing remedies. Europe appears to be ‘muddling through’ rather than acting decisively as a result. This paper argues that European policymakers should focus their attention on financial causal mechanisms. Although there is some truth to claims about lost competitiveness and excessive borrowing, a close focus on financial markets promises to offer the greatest leverage over the largest number of national economies. A close focus on finance also offers a clear choice between competing policy agendas: Europe's politicians must choose either to accept a renationalization of finance or they must embrace reforms necessary to stabilize international financial market integration. Only once that choice is made, and the necessary policy agendas are put in place, should politicians again turn their focus to issues of second-order (if still significant) importance related to market structural reform, fiscal consolidation, or asset market regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early critics of the euro’s design pointed to the disruptive potential — both political and economic — of country-specific shocks in a monetary union that is a far cry from an optimal currency area. The euro crisis has confirmed the risks associated with a ‘one-size-fits-all’ monetary policy, decentralized financial supervision, and inadequate fiscal backstops. This article examines how the active use of national fiscal policies and macroprudential policies can mitigate these risks. Cross-border coordination of macroprudential policies is essential to ensure their effectiveness. In addition, area-wide reforms are necessary including a more complete banking union with a well-funded common backstop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of the multiple narratives EU policymakers could have chosen at the onset of the euro crisis, why did austerity and structural reform win out over other plausible cures for member states’ problems? Arguably, sovereign debt pooling or more federalized economic governance would have been a solution to member states’ national deficits and competitiveness woes. To understand this puzzle, we draw on the sociology of knowledge literature. We argue that the response to the euro crisis was heavily informed by broader social logics that constructed the problem and the solution heavily toward ordoliberal and neoliberal ideas. Mapping the fate of the Eurobond proposals allows us to trace the complex entanglement of economic policy-making and parse out the ways in which social realities are shaped to make particular policy choices seem inevitable, even as they are themselves the product of social processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Euro crisis presents a puzzle to the post-functionalist approach to European integration. In spite of unprecedented social hardships, politicization, loss of popular support and political turmoil in the Eurozone, the Euro crisis has produced major new steps of technocratic supranational integration. This article shows that integration during the euro crisis can be sufficiently explained by a neofunctionalist account based on path dependency, endogenous preference change and functional spill over. Finally, it explores three mechanisms that have helped to shield EU-level reform from a constraining dissensus: euro-compatible government formation, avoidance of referendums and delegation to technocratic supranational organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Our paper investigates the impact of the global and the Euro crisis on citizens’ attitudes towards the European Union (EU). We measure the impact of the Euro crisis on two different levels: First, the crisis itself at the contextual level and second, and more importantly, at the individual level, referring to citizens’ perceptions of the crisis. Our main assumption is that during the crisis, economic explanations find their way back into the study of EU support. We test our hypotheses with 27 EU member states using different Eurobarometer surveys and apply descriptive statistics as well as multi-level regression analyses. Three conclusions emerge from the analysis: First, the impact of the Euro crisis is stronger than in the case of the global financial crisis. Second, support for the EU depends on both the contextual and the individual level although effects of the latter are more prevalent. Third, the effect of the individual perception of the crisis on EU support is stronger in Euro countries as well as in economically powerful countries. Altogether and contrary to major assumptions following post-functional arguments, our findings show that in times of the crisis economic factors again play a major role in the explanation of support for the EU. This leads to a rather critical evaluation for the future of the European integration process. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines whether and how the Euro crisis has affected the long-term trends of politicization of Europe in France. Has the crisis fueled the extent of politicization? Do we observe shifts in specific aspects of Europe being politicized? Are the patterns of opposition changing? To answer these questions, the authors compare the electoral campaign in 2012 with all French campaigns since 1974. Additionally, France is put in a broader comparative perspective. Politicization is conceptualized as three interrelated dimensions: issue salience, actor expansion, and polarization. Methodologically, the article is based on a relational content analysis of newspaper articles. The findings show that the Euro crisis boosted the level of politicization, and economic policies, as well as justification frames became more important. However, the degree of polarization was higher in election campaigns that focused more on constitutional conflicts over membership and were dominated by concerns with national identity and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the latest financial and economic crisis took hold of the European Union (EU), its economic governance architecture has been undergoing crucial changes. Research into the institutional consequences of these reforms is still fragmented — especially with regard to the function of the European Commission. This article seeks to fill this void by analysing the supranational executive’s role in the four areas that have witnessed the most important changes: financial stability support, economic policy surveillance, coordination of national polices and supervision of the financial sector. The empirical evidence suggests that the Commission continues to be a powerful player in EU economic governance, but its primary role is changing. While its agenda-setting power is decreasing, most decisions in economic governance depend on the Commission to make them work. With more and stronger implementation competences, it may be less visible. But it is not less important. This finding qualifies the degree of intergovernmentalism in economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]