The EMU and Its Multi-Level Constitutional Structure: The Need for More Imaginative ‘Dialogue’ Among and Across EU and National Institutions

Abstract

‘Finance’ has become the most salient part of the European project. For better or worse, it has been the EU’s major field of experimentation for institutional innovations, and also the protagonist of its major tensions. Such tensions pervade the Monetary Union, the Banking Union, and the framework for fiscal stability and budgetary coordination, and, in important occasions or respects, have ignited inter-court conflicts, exposed some accountability gaps, and made more difficult than desirable cooperation towards a common policy and mutual understanding, albeit in the diversity, at the inter-governmental level. It need not be like this. All those shortcomings can be overcome without major statutory reform, with a more imaginative use of the tools already in place, and (crucially) a change in the practice of dialogue between institutions and bodies, both from a vertical perspective (notably, courts, but also parliaments and governments) and a horizontal one (between political, administrative and judicial levels of accountability). European Monetary Union, EMU, banking union, fiscal coordination, judicial review, accountability, dialogue