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Findings and Interpretation

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Europe's New Fiscal Union

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Abstract

The height of the crisis management coincided with the institutionalization of a fiscal centre, understood as an incipient and composite fiscal authority that runs across all EMU executive institutions without being embodied by any primus inter pares. The emergence of such a fiscal centre was strongly conditioned and constrained by the path-dependence of the EU’s past institutional modus operandi: an over-reliance on rules on the one hand and the empowerment of technocratic agencies on the other. In the absence of an EMU crisis management mechanism, the crisis acted as a catalyst for the development of common central fiscal capacities. Accordingly, the chapter summarizes the findings of this book and provides an interpretation of the convoluted trajectory that fiscal power centralization took during the euro crisis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Interviewee 40 – EU Council official.

  2. 2.

    Interviewee 38 – European Central Bank official.

  3. 3.

    Obviously, one can however disagree about his claim that the ECB has a ‘very clear but very limited mandate’.

  4. 4.

    Interviewee 30 – Finnish Ministry of Finance official.

  5. 5.

    With the exception of the new emergency procedure in the ESM.

  6. 6.

    Interviewee 40 – EU Council official.

  7. 7.

    Interviewee 46 – European Parliament official.

  8. 8.

    Interviewee 47 – EU Council official.

  9. 9.

    Interviewee 30 – Finnish Ministry of Finance official.

  10. 10.

    Interviewee 30 – Finnish Ministry of Finance official.

  11. 11.

    Interviewee 32 – European Central Bank official.

  12. 12.

    ‘Actually I have another thing I want to mention. Just something I want to throw out there. If we’d known in 2001 we were staying in Afghanistan this long, we would have made some very different choices. Right? Instead our planning cycles rarely look more than 12 months ahead, so this hasn’t been a 14 year war we’ve been waging, but a one-year war, waged 14 times’. Extract from HBO TV Series Homeland, Season 4, Episode 1 S. Berenson, former CIA Director in the fiction.

  13. 13.

    Interviewee 40 – EU Council official.

  14. 14.

    Interviewee 30 – Finnish Ministry of Finance official.

  15. 15.

    See also Honohan (2016).

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  1. European University Institute, Florence, Italy

    Pierre Schlosser

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  1. Pierre Schlosser
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Schlosser, P. (2019). Findings and Interpretation. In: Europe's New Fiscal Union. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98636-4_7

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