The End Of The Eurocrats Dream

This volume argues that the crisis of the European Union is not merely a fiscal crisis but reveals and amplifies deeper flaws in the structure of the EU itself. It is a multidimensional crisis of the economic, legal and political cornerstones of European integration and marks the end of the technocratic mode of integration which has been dominant since the 1950s. The EU has a weak political and administrative centre, relies excessively on governance by law, is challenged by increasing heterogeneity and displays increasingly interlocked levels of government. During the crisis, it has become more and more asymmetrical and has intervened massively in domestic economic and legal systems. A team of economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists analyze these deeper dimensions of the European crisis from a broader theoretical perspective with a view towards contributing to a better understanding and shaping the trajectory of the EU.

Contributions from prominent economists, lawyers, philosophers and political scientists go beyond short-term technical diagnoses in order to analyse the deeper causes of the European crisis and provide readers with a broad understanding of what goes on in the European Union.

In this insightful book, Massimo Fichera provides an original account of European integration as a process. He argues that European constitutionalism has been informed from its earliest stages by a meta-rationale, which is expressed by security and fundamental rights as discourses of power. Employing this descriptive and normative conceptual framework to analyse the development of the EU as a polity, chapters cover significant recent events such as the Eurozone crisis, the refugee crisis, the rule of law crisis, Brexit and the constitutional identity crisis.

Ordoliberalism is a theoretical and cultural tradition of significant societal and political impact in post-war Germany. For a long time the theory was only known outside Germany by a handful of experts, but ordoliberalism has now moved centre stage after the advent of the financial crisis, and has become widely perceived as the ideational source of Germany's crisis politics. In this collection, the contributors engage in a multi-faceted exploration of the conceptual history of ordoliberalism, the premises of its founding fathers in law and economics, its religious underpinnings, the debates over its theoretical assumptions and political commitments, and its formative vision of societal ordering based upon a synthesis of economic theories and legal concepts. The renewal of that vision through the ordoliberal conceptualisation of the European integration project, the challenges of the current European crisis, and the divergent perceptions of ordoliberalism within Germany and by its northern and southern EU neighbours, are a common concern of all these endeavours. They unfold interdisciplinary affinities and misunderstandings, cultural predispositions and prejudices, and political preferences and cleavages. By examining European traditions through the lens of ordoliberalism, the book illustrates the diversity of European economic cultures, and the difficulty of transnational political exchanges, in a time of European crisis.

The book aims at contributing to that debate by offering a new conceptual approach to the core ideas of European integration process (sovereignty, diversity, common challenges, etc).

Volume I considers the history of the European Union from an outside-in perspective, evaluating which outside forces shaped and guided the process of European integration. Taking an innovative, thematic approach, this volume will be of interest to students and researchers of European integration.

Creating the European monetary union between diverse and unequal nation states is arguably one of the biggest social experiments in history. This book offers an explanation of how the euro experiment came about and was sustained despite a severe crisis, and provides a comparison with the monetary-financial history of the US. The euro experiment can be understood as risk-sharing through a currency that is issued by a supranational central bank. A single currency shares liquidity risks by creating larger markets for all financial assets. A single monetary policy responds to business cycles in the currency area as a whole rather than managing the path of one dominant economy. Mechanisms of risk-sharing become institutions of monetary solidarity if they are consciously maintained, but they will periodically face opposition in member states. This book argues that diversity of membership is not an economic obstacle to the success of the euro, as diversity increases the potential gains from risk sharing. But political cooperation is needed to realize this potential, and such cooperation is up against collective action problems which become more intractable as the parties become more diverse. Hence, risk-sharing usually comes about as a collective by-product of national incentives. This political-economic tension can explain why the gains from risk-sharing are not more fully exploited, both in the euro area and in the US dollar area. This approach to monetary integration is based on the theory of collective action when hierarchy is not available as a solution to inter-state cooperation. The theory originates with Keohane and Ostrom (1995) and it is applied in this book, taking into account the latest research on the inherent instability of financial market integration.