Abstract
In this chapter, we investigate the EP’s institutional role in economic governance during the Eurozone crisis and its aftermath. The Lisbon Treaty restricts the EP’s right to co-legislation in economic governance primarily to the area of multilateral surveillance. The entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, however, coincided with the onset of the Eurozone crisis. Hence, we examine the extent to which the EP has been able to increase its own power in the reform of the Economic and Monetary Union. Further, we analyse under which conditions the EP succeeded and failed in expanding its powers beyond the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty. We found that—contrary to conventional wisdom—the EP obtained some (in)formal institutional changes to its benefit. It did so by employing a multitude of strategies such as arena-linking or inventing and implementing new rules unilaterally (‘moving first’). However, whenever the EP’s institutional demands affected core state powers, for instance national budgetary control in the case of member state bailouts, its strategies failed.
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Héritier, A., Meissner, K.L., Moury, C., Schoeller, M.G. (2019). The European Parliament in Economic Governance. In: European Parliament Ascendant. European Administrative Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16777-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16777-6_7
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