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ABSTRACT
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.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. I would also like to thank Stefan Auer, Tim Haughton, George Kyris, Julian Pänke, and Sotirios Zartaloudis for their feedback on a draft version of the article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Nicole Scicluna is a visiting assistant professor of international relations at the University of Hong Kong.
Notes
1 Though this view may be countered by pointing towards the parliamentarization of the EU, which was evident in both law (notably the Lisbon Treaty) and practice prior to the onset of the euro crisis (Rittberger Citation2012).
2 Evidenced, for example, by the election of a record number of Eurosceptics to the European Parliament in 2014. Far from giving cause to celebrate the ability of EU élites to just ‘get on with it’, the marginalization of disaffected citizens may well prompt ‘an even stronger Eurosceptic, anti-establishment backlash’ at the next European elections (or, perhaps, sooner) (Treib Citation2014: 1542).
3 E.g., neofunctionalist accounts tend to view centralised, supranational monetary policy and decentralised, national fiscal policies as a ‘functional dissonance’ that eventually prompted the spillover necessary to overcome it (e.g., Niemann and Ioannou Citation2015). Further integration is cast as the ‘solution’ to the problem of a mismatch between national and supranational competences. The normative implications of the means by which further integration is achieved are de-emphasised.
4 I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this point.
5 The linkage of OMT to ESM-imposed austerity was essential for maintaining the ordoliberal ideology that underlines the currency union. Moral hazard must be avoided and profligacy and irresponsibility (of borrowers, not lenders) punished (Wilkinson Citation2015).
6 Case C-62/14, Peter Gauweiler et al. V. Deutscher Bundestag (OMT case).
7 Case C-370/12, Pringle v. Ireland.
8 The very idea of integration-through-law is compromised by the proliferation of emergency measures taken outside of the EU’s constitutional framework because such measures only confirm the insufficiency of the framework. By confirming the right of member states to co-operate outside of the treaties (so long as their agreements do not infringe treaty provisions), Pringle enables further constitutional fragmentation.
9 A rhetoric of adherence to rules is maintained when it comes to European leaders’ and institutions’ insistence on austerity-based conditionality and the refusal to grant Greece debt relief. Not only is this stance economically self-destructive, but it cannot disguise the fact that EMU’s legal constitution has been jettisoned in favour of non-democratically legitimated emergency rule.
10 Vis-a-vis the ECB. In the OMT decision, the Court did take the opportunity to reassert its exclusive right to interpret the legality of the acts of EU institutions, contra the reservation of a similar right by Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court.
11 Majoritarian democracy did not feature heavily in the initial institutional design of the EC – this was not oversight, but deliberate choice given the distrust of democratic majorities in post-war Western Europe (Müller Citation2011: 125–30).
12 This usurpation of national democratic prerogatives is especially problematic when the value of the outputs is disputed. In Greece, several years of creditor-imposed austerity has failed to improve the economic situation, leading many citizens to become ‘detached’ from both national and supranational democratic processes (Armingeon et al. Citation2016). In Ireland, the ECB’s role in advising the government to guarantee the debts of the country’s banks, as well as the pressure it exerted on national authorities to prevent bank failures and ensure creditors were repaid, is widely regarded as having significantly increased the cost of the crisis for tax payers (Whelan Citation2014: 438–9).
13 E.g., Angela Merkel famously claimed that ‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’ (Spiegel Online Citation2010).
14 As White (Citation2015b: 301) points out, it is more apt to think of the EU’s response to the euro crisis as having created an ‘emergency regime’, rather than having revealed any one actor to be sovereign in the Schmittian sense of having the capacity to declare the state of exception.
15 A forerunner to OMT, this was a programme to buy the bonds of struggling euro area states on secondary markets.