Executive dominance in the contemporary EU is part of a wider migration of executive power towards types of decision making that eschew electoral accountability and popular democratic control. This democratic gap is fed by far-going secrecy arrangements and practices exercised in a concerted fashion by the various executive actors at different levels of governance and resulting in the blacking out of crucial information and documents - even for parliaments. Beyond a deconstruction exercise on the nature and location of EU executive power and secretive working practices, this article focuses on the challenges facing parliaments in particular. It seeks to reconstruct a more pro-active and networked role of parliaments - both national and European - as countervailing power. In this vision parliaments must assert themselves in a manner that is true to their role in the political system and that is not dictated by government at any level.

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Challenging Executive Dominance in European Democracy

Political science analyses of the governance of the euro crisis largely build on conventional theories of European integration to account for the extent to which institutional developments either reflect supranationalism, inter-governmentalism or historical path-dependencies. This analytical focus captures the usual integration dynamics and institutional design outcomes, but overlooks the constitutional dimension of how the crisis affects the EU's legal order. In this agenda-setting article, I draw attention to legal scholarship that highlights important deviations from the EU's ‘legal normalcy’. Legal studies find that a number of emergency measures were taken on an extra-legal basis and through quasi-autocratic procedures. Normative reconstructions interpret this practice as a form of transnational state of exception which transitions into permanent traits of authoritarianism in the EU's legal order. I argue that their findings offer a new terrain for political science research which transcends the explanatory categories of integration theory.

Beyond Integration Theory: The (Anti‐)Constitutional Dimension of European Crisis Governance

The European Constitution and the Eurozone Crisis: A Critique of European Constitutional Pluralism

It is often claimed that the power of finance is pervasive and omnipresent, yet the delicate ways in which financialization exerts its will across space remain relatively little explored. In fact, such claims obscure the fact that financial development constitutes a profoundly uneven process - both across and within national political economies, regions or localities. Put differently, some institutional domains appear less hospitable to the forces of financialization than others. This thesis advances four case studies, which are to varying degrees considered least likely to fall prey to financial seduction, logics and authority. The cases explore the financial activities of four European institutions in various ways tied to the state: a Dutch public university, two local governments in Germany and Ireland, and a German regional public bank. The expectations defining their least likely nature are informed by theory, including the literatures on financialization and comparative institutionalism. The cases reveal that despite expectations the long arm of finance has managed to penetrate these domains, necessitating a number of theoretical advances in the foregrounded literatures. Despite institutional variations in state structures, financial systems, organizational templates, functions and capacities, incessant neoliberalization of state policy has gradually lured if not ‘forced’ these governments and public institutions to adopt financial products and logics. As such, binary depictions of liberal and corporatist states or national bank- and market-based financial systems do not do justice to the ways in which these ideal type ‘containers’ have evaporated or hybridized. Although the cases indicate how financialization is pervasive, the literature is in need of more empirical detail, particularly cases outside the Anglo-American heartland. Only by generating more theoretically grounded empirical accounts on the manifold ways in which state institutions become subject to financial power can the literature start to unmask and theorize the encroaching financialization of the state itself.

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The long arm of finance: Exploring the unlikely financialization of governments and public institutions

For the first time since its creation, the European Union (EU) has been living its probably most significant identity crisis. This crisis has its roots in different critical situations that have hit the EU, have affected its functioning and have fundamentally questioned its legitimacy. The gaps in the EU integration process have been uncovered and the fragmentation of EU policies has become a source of different risks. On the anniversary of sixty years of the Rome Treaties, this Special Issue aims to reflect on the paradigms for EU law looking beyond their competing accounts of EU integration. The analysis is developed through a series of contributions that challenge the paradigms in different directions. The discussion is articulated on two levels. On the one hand, a group of contributions focuses on the historical and legal analysis of the emergence and transformation of the EU legal order. These contributions delve deeper into the absence of a European identity and go beyond the inherent critique that the EU is a demoi-cracy that struggles with a democratic disconnect or even deficit. On the other hand, other contributions debate paradigms and their implementation in important policy domains. These contributions aim to give a more practical perspective on the constitutional and/or administrative character of the European Union, showing its implications and concrete questions. © 2017 Marta Simoncini et al., published by De Gruyter Open 2017.

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How to Bridge the Gaps between Competing Paradigms for EU Law: An Introduction

At several moments during the sovereign debt crisis of 2010-2012, Member State governments of the European Union concluded international agreements between themselves: the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the Fiscal Compact were all agreed in this manner. In each of those cases, a group of EU member states ‘stepped outside’ the EU legal order and the Union’s institutional framework, and instead resorted to instruments of public international law for organising their cooperation. This paper examines the reasons why this turn to international law occurred, and also the legal and institutional consequences of these moves away from EU law. The paper argues that we are not witnessing, at least not for now, an ‘intergovernmental plot’ designed to exclude the supranational institutions of the EU, but rather argues that contingent and plausible reasons explain the use of international law in each case, and that the damage to the constitutional integrity of the European Union is rather limited.

B. de Witte

Papers

Using international law in the Euro crisis : causes and consequences