Eurozone conomic managment after the three crises: have discretionary measures created too much space for domination?

A sequence of crises has engendered profound changes in the economic governance of the European Union (EU), and of the Eurozone (EZ) in particular. As a consequence, the EU has experienced a substantial expansion of its competences. Policy-making has become distinctly more discretionary as rules were suspended or interpreted more flexibly, a development which has involved both supranational and intergovernmental institutions. In turn, this has caused increased divergence between core and periphery EZ Member States – in particular, Germany and Italy, which we take as representative of the two groups – and has given rise to perceptions of domination in both countries. The present chapter explores the extent to which the reformed economic governance of the EU has created conditions of effective dominance in the EU, specifying which actors or forces can be identified as domineering, and which actors or communities should be seen as dominated. We ask whether Europeanisation has gone too far and whether democracy has been sacrificed on the altar of economic integration. In the absence of a greater engagement on the part of the EU publics, the implication would be that there is a need for further differentiation and even for the repatriation of some competences to the national level in order to make the territorial reach of legislation coincide with the demos once more.