The European Rescue of the European Union? The existential crisis

527 Pages·2012·2.39 MB·English

The European Rescue of
the European Union?
The existential crisis of
the European political project
Edoardo Chiti, Agustín José Menéndez
and Pedro Gustavo Teixeira (eds)
ARENA Report No 3/12
RECON Report No 19
The European rescue of the European Union?
The existential crisis of the European political project

Edoardo Chiti, Agustín José Menéndez and Pedro Gustavo
Teixeira (eds)

Copyright  ARENA and authors
ISBN (print) 978-82-93137-40-5
ISBN (online) 978-82-93137-90-0
ARENA Report Series (print) | ISSN 0807-3139
ARENA Report Series (online) | ISSN 1504-8152
RECON Report Series (print) | ISSN 1504-7253
RECON Report Series (online) | ISSN 1504-7261

Printed at ARENA
Centre for European Studies
University of Oslo
P.O. Box 1143, Blindern
N-0318 Oslo, Norway
Tel: + 47 22 85 87 00
Fax: + 47 22 85 87 10
E-mail: [email protected]
http://www.arena.uio.no
http://www.reconproject.eu

Oslo, February 2012

Cover picture: ‘The Uprising’, Honoré Daumier, 1848 or later. The Phillips
Collection, Washington D.C.

Preface

Reconstituting Democracy in Europe (RECON) is an Integrated
Project supported by the European Commission’s Sixth
Framework Programme for Research, Priority 7 ‘Citizens and
Governance in a Knowledge-based Society’. The five-year
project has 21 partners in 13 European countries and New
Zealand, and is coordinated by ARENA – Centre for European
Studies at the University of Oslo.

RECON takes heed of the challenges to democracy in Europe.
It seeks to clarify whether democracy is possible under
conditions of pluralism, diversity and complex multilevel
governance. See more on the project at www.reconproject.eu.

The present report is part of RECON’s work package 7 ‘The
Political Economy of the European Union’, which analyses the
relationship between public finance and democracy in the EU’s
multilevel political system. The report contains the proceedings
of the RECON workshop ‘The European Rescue of the
European Union: The Socio-Economic Malaise of Integration’,
which was held in León on 9-10 September 2011.

Erik Oddvar Eriksen
RECON Scientific Coordinator

Acknowledgements

The editors of this report want to express their deep gratitude
towards the Sierra Pambley Foundation, and especially towards
its executive director Magdalena Corral, for hosting the
workshop, the proceedings of which are published in this
volume. The site of the Foundation, which is deeply embedded
in the contemporary history of León and holds the library of
Gumersindo de Azcárate, proved to be an ideal place to
consider the future of European integration. The editors would
also like to thank the Federal Union that holds the rights of
Lionel Robbins’ text, published in Appendix I, for their kind
permission to reproduce it here. The editors would also express
their gratitude towards Hedwig Weiland at the German Federal
Constitutional Court, for the kindness with which our request for
the English translation of the judgment, published in Appendix II
of this volume, was taken care of. Quite obviously, the only
official text is the one rendered in German, but the translation of
the ruling into English is of fundamental importance given the
auctoritas of the Court all over Europe. The editors would also
like to thank David Ribeiro for all the effort he put in organising
the workshop and ensuring all participants had a very rewarding
time in León.

Edoardo Chiti
Agustín José Menéndez
Pedro Gustavo Teixeira

León, December 2011

Table of contents

Chapter 1
A European Union allo sbando?
Agustín José Menéndez ................................................................................... 1

Chapter 2
On the historical origins of the EU’s current crisis or
the hypocritical turn of European integration
Hagen Schulz-Forberg ................................................................................... 15

Chapter 3
What is left of the integration through law project?
A reconstruction in conflicts-law perspectives
Christian Joerges ........................................................................................... 37

Chapter 4
A proportionate constitution?
Economic freedoms, substantive constitutional choices and
dérapages in European Union law
Agustín José Menéndez ................................................................................. 69

Chapter 5
Weakening the fiscal state in Europe
The European Union’s failure to halt the erosion of progressivity
in direct taxation and its consequences
Jeremy Leaman ............................................................................................ 157

Chapter 6
A crisis of governance
Can comitology theory help legitimize ECB/ESCB operations?
Michelle Everson and Frank Rodrigues ...................................................... 193

Chapter 7
The size that fits no-one
European monetarism reconsidered
Jeremy Leaman ............................................................................................ 229

Chapter 8
Governance and the euro crisis
David G. Mayes ........................................................................................... 257
Chapter 9
European sovereign bailouts, political risk and the economic
consequences of Angela Merkel
Stefan Collignon, Piero Esposito and Hanna Lierse ................................... 295

Chapter 10
A radical strategy for Europe
From the endless bailout of Europe to taking leave from
neoliberalism
Michel Husson ............................................................................................ 327

Chapter 11
How does the financial crisis affect the independence of
the European Central Bank?
Nicola Scotto ................................................................................................ 347

Chapter 12
The European rescue of the European Union
Edoardo Chiti, Agustín José Menéndez and Pedro Gustavo Teixeira ........ 391

Appendix I
Economic aspects of federation
Lionel Robbins ............................................................................................. 429

Appendix II
Federal Constitutional Court of Germany’s ruling on the Greek
rescue package .......................................................................................... 447

Epilogue
What is at stake?
Alexander Somek ......................................................................................... 503
Chapter 1
A European Union allo sbando?

Agustín José Menéndez
University of Léon

The RECON project (Reconstituting Democracy in Europe) has
articulated three different conceptions of the purpose and point of
European integration in polity terms. At the same time, RECON’s
work package 7 on ‘The political economy of the European Union’
(WP 7) has added a second dimension by means of analysing the
conceptions of distributive justice that different visions of European
integration gravitate towards.

A previous report emanating from this project (Letelier and
Menéndez 2009) explored the analytical, axiological and policy
implications of this bi-dimensional understanding of the socio-
economic constitution of the European Union (EU) by means of
contrasting two of the main pillars of the European socio-economic
constitution: the four economic freedoms that constitute the common
market, on the one hand, and the fiscal and monetary constitutional
principles on which the asymmetric European Monetary Union has
been built since 1999 on the other. This arrangement is asymmetric in
the sense that it combines federal and technocratic monetary policy
with formally national and political fiscal and wage policy. This
unprecedented coupling has been matched by a series of governance
arrangements, which were supposed to ensure the coherence of
monetary and fiscal policy.