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European Economic
Governance
Theories, Historical
Evolution, and Reform
Proposals
Fabio Masini
European Economic Governance
Fabio Masini
European Economic
Governance
Theories, Historical Evolution, and Reform
Proposals
Fabio Masini
Department of Political Science
Roma Tre University
Rome, Italy
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Laura and Ken,
for their unconditional support
in this endeavour
Acknowledgements
This volume is the result of long-term research and teaching activities. Let
me first and foremost thank my students that, during the years, with their
wit remarks and inspiring questions, obliged me to think more carefully
about the links among facts, theories, and policies in the historical evolu-
tion of the economic governance in the European integration process.
Reconsidering commonplaces, exposing hidden (or shadowed) critical
knots, digging into the role of narratives, and much more.
I would also like to thank a few friends and colleagues that patiently
read and commented on previous drafts of the manuscript, allowing me to
reduce major shortcomings, blatant omissions, even trivial mistakes. All
the remaining ones are of course my own responsibility.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Designing
and Building a European Economy: From the
1930s to 1991 9
3 Fiscal
Constraints and Supranational Money: From
Maastricht (1992) to Lisbon (2007) 43
5 Reforming
the European Economic Governance
(2020–2022)121
6 Concluding Remarks147
Index155
ix
About the Author
xi
List of Abbreviations
xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Abstract This chapter provides the rationale for the volume and the
methodology we shall be using to deal with the historical evolution of the
concepts and concrete proposals that inspired the making of the European
economic governance. It explains how, to grasp its complexity and under-
stand the main features of its recent developments, it is key to observe and
single out the never-ending connections among major historical events,
evolving economic theories, and public policies, highlighting the feed-
backs and signals that come to be established among them. Contrary to
most academic narratives on European integration, we shall concentrate
not only on success stories but also on failures, as we believe they may
prove key to avoiding previous mistakes and shortcomings of current proj-
ects for further integration, which are indeed very similar to past ones.
2010; Brunnermeier et al., 2016; Dyson & Maes, 2016); most of such
perspectives are nevertheless narrowed by the examination of success sto-
ries, highlighting the cultural traditions behind current economic policy
arrangements and structures. And the monumental works by Dyson and
Quaglia (2010) provide a wide-ranging commentary on the most impor-
tant documents that accompanied the making of the European economic
governance.
Our perspective here is different, inspired by the suggestion of Niels
Thygesen (2020), President of the European Fiscal Board, who recently
suggested an institutional change in the European economic governance,
with the creation of an EU Treasury, learning from the failures of similar
proposals in the past. What follows is an attempt to provide, with a (hope-
fully) fluid narrative open to a wide audience, an evolving framework—
organized in chronological terms—of the most relevant features of the
European economic governance, since its early stages until the recent
health and geopolitical crises; to highlight both successes and failures; and
review reform proposals that have been, and are being, discussed; and that
might shape the future of the European economy.
The methodology of enquiry is one of those prevailing in the subject
matter of the history of economic thought. Theories, events, and public
choices are closely interdependent factors in the processes of production
and circulation of ideas that are, in turn, key to forging public policies and
to determine how history evolves. Although a division of labour has
tended to emerge (Cairncross, 1996: 3) in the academic studies, where
each of the three factors has become the core object of study by special-
ized intellectuals, these features are inherently highly interdependent. And
cannot be studied separately without failing to grasp the general picture of
historical evolution.
This is the reason why this volume tries to focus on highlighting the
evolving and never-ending impulses and feedbacks among facts, theories,
and policies (Masini, 2013); trying to underline the extent and direction
of such feedbacks and causal relations; reconstructing the (changing) role
of each of these three components in the evolution of the European inte-
gration process as concerns its economic governance. This is the reason
why we selected arguments and threads that allowed us to underline such
interdependencies.
This book is devoted primarily to post-graduate university students,
and to under-graduate students that are familiar with basic macroeconom-
ics: they are the generation that will ultimately bear the consequences of
1 INTRODUCTION 5
the choices that we now make (or avoid making) concerning the architec-
ture of the next years of the European integration. At least, they should be
aware of where we come from, how we arrived here, and what is at stake
in the forthcoming years. This book might also be of some help to scholars
in a variety of fields concerning economics, political science, and interna-
tional relations dealing with European integration, as it seeks to provide a
concise reconstruction of the origins and evolution of the European econ-
omy and its management.
The next chapter dwells on the emergence of Europe as an optimum
policy area, an experimental unit to attempt overcoming conflicting
national sovereignties and building a workable supranational and multi-
layered democracy. An intellectual experiment first that attracted many
diverse cultural traditions, which then became mature during the years
soon before WWII, and would later provide the intellectual push and pol-
icy proposals for its first building blocks after the war. Under the Bretton
Woods regime and the Cold War, Europe thought the experiment might
take as much time as was necessary to compromise among conflicting
national interests and cultural backgrounds, thus mainly progressing
merely in economic and monetary integration.
The third chapter reconstructs the concrete steps made in building the
infrastructure of the European economic governance since the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, which imposed an acceleration on history. Europe
needed to step up but was found largely unprepared. The response was the
Maastricht Treaty, with both its bright and dark sides. Fiscal constraints
were hoped to supplement the lack of collective political discretional
power, and the euro was born with inherent shortcomings that only
needed a major crisis to deflagrate.
Chapter 4 shows what happened when crises hit. First the US-led finan-
cial crisis; then the asymmetric, endogenous sovereign-debt crisis. Despite
ex-ante criticism to the theory of expansionary consolidation applied to
the fragile European institutional and decision-making architecture, an
increasing intergovernmental governance and further strengthening of fis-
cal rules led to divergent macroeconomic performance in the euro-area,
with a wide-ranging impact on public consensus towards European inte-
gration and the rise of euro-exit and euro-sceptic narratives that European
institutions were not able to address adequately.
Chapter 5 is almost chronicle. It shows how different the reaction of
European institutions was against the Covid-19 pandemic since Spring
2020. It shows that Europe is struggling to increase its global actorness in
6 F. MASINI
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1 INTRODUCTION 7
1
Just to cite a few among them: William H. Beveridge, Attilio Cabiati, Edwin Cannan,
Luigi Einaudi, Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Jean Monnet, François Perroux,
Lionel Robbins, Wilhelm Röpke, Jacques Rueff, Barbara Wootton.
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