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The theory of international regime complexity that frames this study specifies expectations for international cooperation stemming from different combinations of hierarchy and differentiation among institutions in regime complexes. This paper compares relationships between regional financial arrangements and the International Monetary Fund in the regional complexes for crisis finance in East Asia, Latin America, and the euro area during 2000-2019 and tests these expectations. Creditor states that sit at the nexus between global and regional institutions are particularly influential in the choice of architecture (the combination of hierarchy and differentiation) for these complexes but are constrained by arrangements inherited from previous decades. Once chosen, the complex's architecture in turn shapes policy adjustment in borrowing countries and influences whether states pursue regime shifting or competitive regime creation when dissatisfied with institutions. These findings generally coincide with expectations, but exceed the degree of policy adjustment that the core theory expected for the euro area. Interinstitutional collaboration, the dynamics of which are elaborated, fills this explanatory gap. The paper concludes that relations among institutions are essential for understanding the outcomes and evolution of regime complexes and underpin a more complete explanation than provided by singular institutionalism, the power-gap hypothesis and other alternative approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Europe's Crisis of Legitimacy: Governing by Rules and Ruling by Numbers in the Eurozone, Vivien Schmidt authoritatively charts how the European Union weathered the crisis of its single currency in the 2010s, gradually moving from fiscal austerity and structural reform to a more systemic solution and flexible interpretation of the euro's governing rules. Using a discursive institutionalist approach in combination with a "systems theory" understanding of democratic decision making, Schmidt persuasively argues that we need to look at the euro problem as a fundamentally political problem that lacked democratic legitimacy as long as technocrats were in charge of policy solutions. Schmidt argues that the euro crisis needs to be broached from the point of view of the E.U.'s split-level legitimacy as well as the growing politicization of E.U. governance in an era of increasing populism and rising Euroskepticism. Schmidt's application of discursive institutionalism allows readers to judge for themselves whose and which ideas mattered, why and in what way they were implemented, and how they gradually evolved over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of populist parties is a defining feature of political change in the advanced capitalist countries. Whereas a large body of research explores populist parties in domestic politics, we know little about how populist parties of right and left have responded to the transformation of the transnational Eurozone regime. In this paper, we show how the diverse exposure to the costs and benefits of EMU can explain their EU-level economic policy positions and thereby create opportunities for populist alliances across the left-right divide. In the debtor countries of Southern Europe, populist parties of both right and left have resisted demands for neoliberal reform during the Euro crisis while supporting fiscal risk-sharing arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic, making populist left-right coalitions possible. In the creditor countries of Northern Europe, by contrast, populist right and left parties have been fundamentally divided throughout. Based on case study analyses of Germany and Italy, the most prominent creditor and debtor countries, our findings suggest that populist parties may only find common ground when ‘Brussels’ interferes in domestic policy-making autonomy by imposing neoliberal reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ordoliberalism is often recognized as a powerful ideational source during the Euro crisis; however, there is no pure ordoliberal vision of European integration, and ordoliberal ideas have been used to support both Eurosceptical and Europeanist positions during the crisis. This article reconstructs the ordoliberal theoretical and political debate on European integration and argues that there exist two ordoliberal paradigms of European integration: one bottom-up, whereby the commitment to liberal economic policies at the national level is the precondition for a liberal international order; the other top-down, whereby a liberal international order can help the establishment of a liberal order at the national level. The article compares two ordoliberal visions of the international order: Wilhelm Röpke's 'liberalism from below' (which follows the bottom-up logic) and Viktor Vanberg's 'competitive federalism' (which follows the top-down logic). Then, it explores the ordoliberal political debate on two episodes of the European integration process – the Maastricht Treaty and the Euro crisis – to argue that the bottom-up and the top-down logics underpinned, respectively, Eurosceptical and Europeanist arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research investigates links between the Euro Crisis and populism and asks whether there are patterns of populism in different election campaigns, namely is there country-specific populist rhetoric or similar anti-elite criticisms? Through content analysis, we examine the mainstream media coverage of populist and non-populist actors in the countries that were most affected by the Euro Crisis (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain) and in Poland, a country that, despite not being part of the Euro, has been experiencing a significant rise of populism recently. These are also countries underrepresented in systematic empirical political communication research and that represent different levels of success of populism. Our findings show that although mainstream news media tends to be negative towards populist candidates, there are important cross-country differences with potential impact on the electoral success and failure of populist actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the global financial crisis, the relationships between gender and political economy have received renewed attention, emphasising change as well as continuities. Similarly, a recent return of attention to the interrelation between masculinity and neoliberalism has stressed historicity and specificity in the nature of these relationships. However, the question how articulations of gender and the economy are socially and politically made within a contested field of economic governance has not yet received attention. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature with the concept of gendered performative agency, which can be used to specify the link between masculinities and political economy, and inform a gendered analysis of important politico-economic events. Empirically, it contributes a study of the making of the monetary policy principles of the European Monetary Union (EMU), analysing the gendered performative agency of the governors of the German Bundesbank in their public discourse from 1988 to 1998. It argues that by mobilising metaphors of disciplinary masculinity in their discourse of monetary policy and in their performances of identity, the governors fostered legitimacy for their policy positions. Thus, the performance of masculinity contributed to performing monetary policy and to shaping the EMU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars regularly mobilise the concept of policy paradigm to characterise successive periods in which certain ideas appear to structure policymaking. While this concept proved useful to establish that ideas matter, it is time to start thinking about ideas in ways that better resonate with actors' practices. This article introduces and empirically illustrates two conceptual alternatives. First, it looks at international monetary relations from 1944 through the early 1970s. Instead of simply labelling this period as 'Keynesian,' it shows that the enduring centrality of gold was a pivotal practice among policy makers. Second, it considers the governance of the Eurozone in the run-up to the crisis of the 2010s. Rather than viewing this period as 'neoliberal,' it highlights a new discursive repertoire of governance that produced both austerity and unconventional policies. In sum, practices and repertoires help to make sense of elements of continuity, ambiguity and contestation that are often obscured by ideational analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom about the European sovereign debt crisis and its handling defends that fiscal austerity is unpopular and that external conditionality and/or imposition on national democracies generates backlash. However, not enough research has addressed this question: How willing are citizens to accept unpopular policies imposed on their national governments by European institutions? Would they object to unpopular policies less if these were coming from their national representatives? In this article, we propose a survey experiment, complemented by four focus groups, to test whether citizens' willingness to accept economic policies varies depending on whether the decision originates in the national parliament or in EU institutions. The experiment was conducted in Spain in 2017. Our results show that agreement with a particular policy does not depend on the policy-making actor but on the policy's content. The bitter pill of austerity is no less bitter because elected politicians decide it at home. Similarly, EU 'diktat' does not make a popular policy less popular. Our conclusion is that Spanish citizens during the Euro crisis objected to the policy of austerity due in large part to its content and not to the EU intervention in favour of implementing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article systematically reviews EMU governance reforms implemented, policy instruments introduced and further institutional reforms currently under discussion with a view of how far they have addressed the institutional shortcomings of the euro-area architecture, which have led to the euro crisis of 2010ff. It further explores how far these reforms have helped to prevent a replay of that crisis when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the euro area. To this end, the article first reviews the academic debate about the causes of the euro crisis that started with the Greek sovereign debt crisis in 2010. In a second step, it evaluates the reforms implemented since the onset of the euro crisis and during the COVID-19 crisis with regard in how far these reforms have addressed or could address the causes of the crisis and gives an outlook on potential forthcoming problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, real GDP per capita in Portugal has nearly stagnated. The conventional account attributes this to the mismanagement of public finances and the lack of structural reforms in labor and product markets prior to the "adjustment program" agreed with the troika in the early 2010s. In the same vein, the neoclassical-inspired interpretation explains the subsequent recovery based on supply-side and fiscal reforms implemented during the troika years, which would account for the reduced fiscal deficits, external equilibrium and employment growth registered in the pre-COVID-19 period. In this article, we challenge this optimistic view, identifying structural weaknesses of the Portuguese economy that would have soon become apparent even if the pandemic had not happened. Addressing these weaknesses requires changes that go beyond the EU and national responses to the pandemic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the European Union a technocracy? Observers and practitioners of EU politics have debated this deceptively simple question for decades, without arriving at a clear answer. To a large extent, this is due to the elusive nature of technocracy itself, a phenomenon that is hard to define with precision, and even harder to measure empirically. To tackle this problem, the article presents a novel approach to technocracy in the EU based on the study of bargaining settings, in which political and technical actors interact horizontally and simultaneously—as opposed to sequentially—thus allowing for a better appraisal of the power of experts. Using data gathered by the 'EMU Choices' project, we apply this alternative framework to the analysis of negotiations on the reform of the Economic and Monetary Union over the period 2010–15, focusing on the role of two institutional actors: the European Central Bank and the European Commission. While we find some evidence for technocracy in EMU negotiations, this has been mostly at the hands of the hybrid Commission rather than the quintessentially technical ECB. This suggests both caution in dismissing the EU as hopelessly technocratic, and the need for further research on the nature of the Commission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After an initial phase of firefighting against the euro crisis that began in 2010, one that was characterized by policies that focused on strict austerity, from 2014 onwards the European Commission gradually began to ease its recommendations about fiscal consolidation. Between 2015 and 2016, this policy turn was reflected in series of procedural changes in the European Semester. These gave the Commission a certain degree of discretion in applying the rules and interpreting the benchmarks of the post-crisis EU economic governance arrangements. This article investigates if this double shift in fiscal policy and governance that was initiated in 2014 has been consolidated in 2019, and, if so, what has driven that consolidation. By building on the literatures on EU politicization and policy learning, it asks whether the character of this intra-paradigm policy shift has been more Bayesian or sociological. Based on interviews and on a small-scale survey conducted with key civil servants working at the European Commission, we find evidence to support the putative explanation that, through a political process of policy learning, European Semester officials have acquired a more politicized and flexible practice of fiscal governance and a more social vision of the European Semester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euro crisis has shaken up the euro zone. It pushed the boundaries of political conflict, it triggered the most intensive period of decision-making so far and ultimately led to a set of institutional reforms, which define new domains of euro zone decision-making, such as in the case of financial assistance, and assign new roles to different political actors. At last, the crisis became the focal point of scholarly debate and new research activity, some of which has been finalised only more recently. This warrants new debate. In this debate section a group of scholars from political science and legal studies, who have contributed to the study of euro crisis decisionmaking and euro zone development in the context of recent collaborative research projects, discuss who leads the euro zone. Most importantly, they debate what we can learn from crisis decision-making and euro zone politics in recent years more broadly for the question of who leads the euro zone today and who may determine its future policy decisions and institutional reform trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Euro zone economic governance is determined by governments, as member states resist ultimate transfers of authority to traditional supranational institutions. Neither crisis-driven institutional change nor later reform initiatives have altered this predominant role of domestic executives. The Commission cannot exercise ultimate decision-making powers in the domain of economic governance unilaterally. Instead it is co-opted to what could be called a collective euro zone executive of member state governments. The latter act by consensus or not at all. The democratic pathologies of European politics imply that governments remain reluctant to vacate their seats in euro zone governance. So far, governments have consistently opted for making collective decisions and have chosen to circumvent domestic actors when the euro was at risk. However, governments shy away from forward-looking reforms, which have redistributive implications and are beyond their future control, as they remain uncertain of their own legitimacy when deciding on the euro's future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing a multidimensional conception of power shows how interaction between EU institutional actors is structured by different kinds of power – coercive, institutional and ideational – and that none of these are sufficient on their own for actors to successfully drive the reform process. We ask not just who leads the euro zone, but how interactions between actors enable the polity to achieve (or not) its goals. This requires thinking of power in terms of both zero-sum and positive-sum outcomes, which reveals the weakness of the polity as a whole, whatever the power of different institutional actors. In this view, key for the long-term sustainability of the euro zone is an economic and political rebalancing among its members borne out at the level of common ideas and institutions and the leadership of the most resourceful member states. Despite significant reforms in wake of the crisis, such rebalancing seems far beyond the horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews how different integration theories interpret which political actors mattered in governmental preference formation during the euro crisis. It presents new evidence on the respective influence of national governments, European Union (EU) intergovernmental bodies – including the Eurogroup, the European Council and expert committees – supranational institutions, as well as parliamentary forces and socio-economic interest groups. Contrary to understandings of domestic preference formation as an insulated process, which precedes EU negotiations in the context of two-level games, new data on all 28 member states reveals that decision making by heads of governments and finance ministries was to a large extent decoupled from other domestic interests while EU-level forums for collective decision making played a constitutive role. The findings endorse in particular new intergovernmentalist interpretations of the euro crisis. By empirically testing competing theoretical interpretations of configurations of actor influence, this article proposes an alternative route to the study of preference formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Depoliticization has emerged as a key concept for explaining the legitimation of austerity during the euro crisis: in the face of growing social unrest over their austerity-based crisis management, EU and national policy elites would attempt to remove the political character of economic policy-making, thus insulating budgetary issues from public deliberation and party competition. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the actual success of depoliticizing strategies in effectively achieving these aims. By setting up a dialogue between two research programmes on (de)politicization that have developed so far in isolation, the article articulates a new framework for studying the impacts of depoliticization. Empirically, the analysis focuses on the process of discursive depoliticization of budgetary policy in Spain in the context of the austerity-oriented budgetary reforms implemented between 2010 and 2013. Methodologically, this process of (contested) discursive depoliticization is examined by developing a relational content analysis of the parties' electoral manifestos and newspapers' opinion articles on budgetary policy that were published in the three electoral campaigns held in Spain before, during and after the euro crisis. The analysis shows that the EU-led depoliticization of budgetary policy encountered important political limits in Spain, in fact paradoxically promoting a re-politicizing backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Central Bank (ECB) has often been portrayed as highly resistant to ideational change. This paper paints a different picture. A battle of ideas dominated the academic debate on the euro crisis: one view stressed crisis-stricken countries' fiscal laxity, whereas the other highlighted the systemic roots of financial turmoil. I argue that the failure of policy experiments inspired by the fiscal discipline view favoured the ECB's adoption of systemic risk ideas, which shaped its crisis response. Empirically, I use an innovative technique combining automated text classification and unsupervised scaling methods to detect ideational variation in ECB Executive Board members' public speeches. Results indicate that the ECB has progressively moved from a fiscal to a systemic narrative of the euro crisis. Significantly, this shift anticipated and accompanied the ECB's commitment to unlimited bond purchases in summer 2012. Evidence suggests that this ideational turn was incremental and driven by policy learning dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical approaches to European integration often downplay and sometimes ignore the role of external actors. But the regime complex through which the euro crisis of 2010-2015 was prosecuted involved the United states directly and indirectly through the IMF. Tracing such external involvement shows that, although they preferred greater deepening of euro area institutions than was achieved, U.S. and IMF officials nonetheless contributed substantially to the creation of the EFSF/ESM, robust ECB action and launch of the banking union project. The conclusion formulates falsifiable expectations on which a theory of external influence in regional integration can be developed and tested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the solidarity discourse in the Euro crisis and Europe's migration crisis and examines how meanings of solidarity are framed and which political parties participate in these debates. The discourse coalition and coalition magnet approaches are combined to study the two discourse dynamics of demanding solidarity (migration crisis) or being criticised for not showing solidarity (Euro crisis) in the German media discourse. By applying the discourse network methodology, the interdependence of framing and actor visibility is analysed. It is demonstrated that solidarity is linked to austerity by a conservative party discourse coalition in the Euro crisis. The migration crisis discourse is shaped by one large discourse coalition, arguing for political solidarity. In 2015, political solidarity is challenged by security and demarcation claims in the migration crisis. The study contributes to the ideational research framework and demonstrates the different trajectories of solidarity in Europe in hard times. [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]

The paper proposes a post-Keynesian analysis of the Eurozone crisis and contrasts interpretations inspired by New Keynesian, New Classical, and Marxist theories. We analyze the role different paradigms attribute to current account imbalances, fiscal policy and monetary policy. Remarkably, opposing views on the relative importance of cost and demand developments in explaining current account imbalances can be found in both heterodox and orthodox economics. Regarding the assessment of fiscal and monetary policy there is a clearer polarization, with heterodox analysis regarding austerity as unhelpful and large parts of orthodox economics endorsing it. We conclude that there is a weak mapping between post-Keynesian, New Classical, New Keynesian and Marxist theories and different economic policy strategies for the Euro area, which we label Keynesian New Deal, European Orthodoxy, Moderate Reform and Progressive Exit respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses the framing of solidarity in the Euro crisis discourse. Previous research has argued that the Euro crisis and the debtor–creditor constellation highlights the political conflict around solidarity in the EU. Based on a discursive institutionalist framework, the article investigates the different meanings of solidarity as well as the constellation of actors in Germany and Ireland from 2010 to 2015. Whilst Germany as the biggest creditor country is understood as a potential giver of solidarity, Ireland as a debtor country is conceptualised as a potential receiver of solidarity. The discourse network methodology is applied to study the relation of framing and actor presence. The findings show that the ideational structure of both discourses is different, but the actor constellation is rather similar. In particular, solidarity and austerity are linked in the German discourse, while the Irish discourse focuses predominantly on responsibility and solidarity, and less so on austerity. The actor constellation shows a dominance of German actors in both countries, highlighting the central position of Germany within the Eurozone. The article is the first study to analyse the construction of solidarity in the Euro crisis and contributes to the study of solidarity in hard times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the crisis, the Eurogroup underwent a significant expansion of competences in the field of loan provision, fiscal surveillance and structural reform. Still, to that day, it remains an informal institution, largely avoiding codification and public sanctioning. Against this background, this paper asks how the Eurogroup works internally and which value its informal character has for its modus operandi. For this, institutions are conceptualised as structures which distribute institutional power between members. Using data of expert interviews and official documents, the conflict over the Greek reform programme in 2015 is analysed. It shows that selective communication and immediate interaction, both particular qualities of informality, had a significant impact on the solutions produced within the group. The northern European countries were able to pull outcomes closer to their preferred austerity-political course by using these qualities to divert and focus external pressure and react adaptably to resistance. The findings indicate that, at least in the case of strong conflict, the consensus logic of informal environments such as the Eurogroup makes way for the use of institutional power. [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]

The following is the transcript of a debate, entitled 'Pensare un'alternativa' (Thinking of an Alternative), between Olivier Blanchard, former Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund and a leading exponent of mainstream macroeconomics, and Emiliano Brancaccio, author of the book Anti-Blanchard and advocate of 'The Economists' Warning' against European deflationary policies. The debate examines, from two different theoretical perspectives, the global great recession, the Eurozone crisis, the effects of austerity and deflation, increased social inequality, and political conflict. It took place at the Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan, Italy, on 19 December 2018, and was moderated by the journalist Pietro Raitano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) response to the euro crisis brought new relevance to the debate on socialization through European institutions. While previous studies differ in their support for EU socialization, many have argued that the euro crisis revealed a far-reaching convergence of views among Europe's leaders. Theoretically, the European Central Bank (ECB) in particular is expected to have the power to socialize its governors into a common worldview. The present article questions this proposition. Using the technique of cognitive mapping to provide an in-depth analysis of the views of five members of the ECB Governing Board, we find that even for ECB governors national culture generally trumps EU socialization. Only for ECB President Trichet significant evidence of EU socialization is found. The study also points to some new scope-conditions for socialization that may further our understanding of how European institutions may foster the sustainable socialization of views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this contribution is to account for the different political reform trajectories resulting from two of the most recent governance challenges faced by the European Union (EU), the so-called euro and refugee crises. While the euro crisis triggered various EU-level reforms, the refugee crisis has produced calls for policy and institutional reforms, most of which have - to date - not been adopted or implemented. We employ a liberal intergovernmentalist framework and show that differences in member states’ preferences in the two crises ensue from different exposures to negative externalities. Moreover, we attribute differences in EU member states’ willingness to engage in political reforms to variation in preference constellations among member states, producing different situation structures and bargaining dynamics. While the EU’s response to the euro crisis reflects a situation structure, which highlights both redistributive conflict and a demand for joint action, the response to the refugee crisis resembles a ‘Rambo’ game situation: the states least affected by migratory pressure were satisfied with the institutional status quo, and were thus able to leave the more affected states aggrieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than halting European integration, the euro crisis, in some ways, has accelerated it. However, it is integration of a different type, which departs significantly from the rule of law-based model of integration that traditionally burnished the European Union’s legitimacy. The crisis-induced transformation of the European Central Bank (ECB) captures this trend. Through schemes such as Outright Monetary Transactions, the Bank bolstered its capacity to stabilize the euro without having its mandate formally enlarged, thus confirming the ascendency of technocratic, and often ad hoc, governance over democratically and legally circumscribed alternatives. This article posits the ECB’s expanded and politicized role as the manifestation of a new mode of integration - integration through the disintegration of law - which inverts the court-driven integration-through-law that consolidated the single market. However, the lack of a solid legitimacy base casts doubt on the long-term sustainability of this integration mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective - asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone - or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what actors have done and why they have been influential or not. The paper argues that rather than bifurcating the issues of legitimacy and power politics, much may be gained by investigating the relationship between legitimacy and power. Specifically, the paper employs the concept of ideational power to analyze the strategies through which actors have sought to defend their claims to three constitutive dimensions of legitimacy - input, output and throughput legitimacy - and proposes a matrix of nine pathways to legitimation that played into processes of legitimacy battles in the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure seeks to prevent and correct destabilizing economic imbalances in the European Union (EU). Scholars are divided as to whether this instrument of economic policy co-ordination relies on familiar intergovernmental modes of decision-making or reflects supranational institutions more significant role in economic policy following the euro crisis. Such diametrically opposed interpretations are symptomatic of longstanding concerns over the lack of a clear-cut definition of European integration. To address these definitional difficulties, this article turns to the concept of legalization. Taking account of the design and early implementation of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure and using the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines as a point of comparison, it shows that the former can be understood as a modest but clear-cut increase in legalization compared to the latter. On this basis, it considers whether legalization, in spite of its own conceptual limitations, can contribute to a more rigorous definition of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the (lack of any lasting) impact of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory on economic policy-making in Germany. The analysis highlights the interplay between economic history and the history of ideas in shaping policy-making in postwar (West) Germany. The paper argues that Germany learned the wrong lessons from its own history and misread the true sources of its postwar success. Monetary mythology and the Bundesbank, with its distinctive anti-inflationary bias, feature prominently in this collective odyssey. The analysis shows that the crisis of the euro today is largely the consequence of Germany’s peculiar anti-Keynesianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that the emergence of the federal power to tax is the result of a sovereign debt crisis at the state level. I analyse the fiscal history of the early United States (US) to demonstrate how the institutional flaws of the Articles of Confederation, mainly the central budget based on contributions from the states, so-called ‘requisitions’, led to a sovereign debt crisis on the state level, which triggered taxpayers’ revolts in 1786/1787. This social unrest, in turn, was perceived by the political élite as an endogenous threat to the union and paved the way for the fiscalization of the federal government, i.e., the creation of a fiscal union with the federal power to tax based firmly in the Constitution of 1789. This analysis concludes with four insights for the European Union (EU). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the comparative capitalism literature, the European Central Bank's (ECB's) ‘one-size-fits-none’ monetary policy played a key role in the widening of trade imbalances in the euro area (EA) by being overly restrictive for the region's coordinated market economies (CMEs) and overly expansionary for the region's mixed market economies (MMEs). According to this literature, wage setting institutions mediated how the ECB's monetary policy re-distributed resources between the traded and non-traded sectors in these varieties of capitalism. By examining three separate transmission channels of the ECB's monetary policies (wage and price setting in labor and product markets; nominal exchange rate of the euro; funding costs and bank credit), this paper goes beyond the traditional emphasis on wage setting institutions and draws attention to those institutions that underpin the non-price competitiveness of traded sectors. Overall, the paper explains how the institutional infrastructure of the CMEs bolstered the adaptability of their traded sectors to the ECB's single monetary policy and its three transmission mechanisms – both during the pre-crisis era of widening imbalances and the period of asymmetrical trade rebalancing since the outbreak of the euro crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the global financial crisis, economists have been downbeat about the growth prospects of the capitalist world economy, leading many to argue that we have re-entered a period of “secular stagnation”. The phenomenon of secular stagnation is intrinsically connected to the evolution of global macroeconomic imbalances. During the pre-crisis era of the “Great Moderation”, the widening of global and European trade imbalances temporarily alleviated the problem of secular stagnation by forging a symbiotic yet unsustainable relationship between debt-financed consumption-led growth models in deficit countries and export-led growth models in surplus countries. The re-surfacing of secular stagnation and the asymmetric adjustment of these imbalances after the crisis can both be traced back to the domestic political constraints experienced by many advanced market economies in trying to revive their pre-crisis growth models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demarcated by growing austerity, economic uncertainty and EU-exits, the past decade witnessed monumental shifts across the political and economic landscapes of Europe. Citizenship is a stabilising force in this era of crisis, particularly for intra-EU migrants. In this contribution, I examine how the Euro crisis impacted citizenship acquisition among these migrants. Building upon the model proposed by John Graeber's article [2016. 'Citizenship in the shadow of the Euro crisis: explaining changing patterns in naturalisation among intra-EU migrants.' Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (10): 1670-1692], I discuss the relative importance of citizenship in times of crisis from global and regional perspectives. I argue Graeber's theory presents a strong model for citizenship acquisitions during the crisis, yet leaves the core dyadic structure and several inconsistent findings unexamined. I replicate these models and introduce a dyadic model using bilateral data from 21 receiving and 23 sending states in Europe between 2007 and 2013. Contrary to Graeber's theory, I find citizenship acquisitions among intra-EU migrants primarily coincide with increased in-migration, rather than influences of the Euro crisis. I conclude that while economic sending and receiving contexts matter, the Euro crisis did not appear to restructure intra-EU migrant citizenship incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euro crisis has put to test the intergovernmental decision-making regime institutionalized by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty for dealing with the economic policy side of the Economic and Monetary Union. Under the pressure of the euro collapse, the heads of state and government have introduced new legal measures and intergovernmental treaties that have radically transformed the European economic governance. How to interpret this transformation? The article discusses two of the main paradigms (liberal intergovernmentalism and neo-functionalism) used by scholars for interpreting the EU, showing their weakness in explaining that transformation. Looking at the euro crisis institutional implications through the two paradigms is a necessary exercise for elaborating a more comprehensive approach to the changes in the European economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Union is facing multiple crises: the euro and sovereign debt crisis puts into question its economic and social cohesion as well as the rules of coexistence within the Economic and Monetary Union; the refugee crisis brought to the fore a high degree of disagreement among member states as to the duties of mutual solidarity and assistance; Brexit highlighted the need to continuously justify EU membership (Britain being the most evident, but not at all the only case in which public opinion sees membership with deep scepticism), and to address the social and economic roots of dissatisfaction with the EU – inasmuch as EU-internal, economically motivated migration has been one of the key issues of the ‘leave’ campaign; the security crisis put into question the Schengen agreement and the mutual trust between member states in security issues. The political conundrum currently challenging the EU calls for reflection on what went wrong with the process of European integration in the first place. The essay offers a possible diagnosis and traces a number of scenarios for the future development of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In mid-November 2011, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tendered his formal resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano. It was a humiliating ‘political exit’ for the controversial Italian leader who had been the dominant figure in Italian politics since the mid-1990s. With Italy in the throes of an unprecedented financial crisis, Berlusconi’s squabbling centre-right coalition had appeared increasingly incapable of dealing with the economic emergency engulfing the country. To restore credibility, Napolitano appointed Mario Monti who quickly put together an emergency government. Since then, the downfall of Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister has generated a good deal of controversy. Allegations that Berlusconi was pushed out of power by a cabal of domestic and international detractors have been rife both inside and outside Italy. But how plausible are these claims? Was Berlusconi brought down by a conspiracy orchestrated by Napolitano and instigated by Italy’s EU partners? This article will address these questions and, to do so, it will chart the dramatic events that led to his downfall and examine the international and domestic contexts in which these events took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes ofOtheringtaking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This article investigates the determinants of parliamentary support for international fiscal aid. Departing from the literature on presidential systems, it analyses an exemplary case of a parliamentary system, Germany. Two theoretical accounts are distinguished. The first perceives MPs as policy-seekers and focuses on the positioning of government and opposition parties and individual MPs on an economic left?right and a pro- versus anti-EU dimension. The second regards MPs as vote-seekers and presumes an electoral district connection. The statistical analysis of a new data-set containing information on 17 Bundestag roll-call votes from 2009 to 2015 finds support for the first account: voting in favour of fiscal aid measures is mainly driven by government membership and EU support. By contrast, neither economic ideologies, nor district or mandate characteristics influence support for fiscal aid. The article contributes to a growing literature on the domestic politics of international political economy. [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]

The Euro crisis has transformed the European political and economic landscape. Amidst lingering political uncertainties, austerity, high unemployment, and diminished levels of trust in the European project, how has the Euro crisis affected the institution of citizenship within the European Union? While the development of EU citizenship and the number of rights and freedoms attached to it since the 1990s has progressively reduced the incentive of intra-EU migrants to acquire citizenship in other member states, I argue that the Euro crisis and its political and economic consequences have reinvigorated the perceived value of national citizenship. In its wake, many intra-EU migrants, and especially those from the most crisis-stricken countries, may have a renewed incentive naturalise in other member states. Using data collected for 14 Western European countries from 2000 to 2013, I demonstrate how a growing lack of trust in political institutions and economic hardship since the Euro crisis has inspired surprising new naturalisation trends across Europe. Rather than perpetuate a further decline of national citizenship in Europe, the Euro crisis appears to have rendered national citizenship once again politically consequential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper offers an account of the Euro crisis based on post-Keynesian monetary theory and its typology of demand regimes. Neoliberalism has transformed social and financial relations in Europe but it has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process. Instead, growth has relied either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). In Europe the financial crisis has been amplified by an economic policy architecture (the Stability and Growth Pact) that aimed at restricting the role of fiscal policy and monetary policy. This neoliberal economic policy regime in conjunction with the separation of monetary and fiscal spheres has turned the financial crisis of 2007 into a sovereign debt crisis in southern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]