Emerging from the Euro Crisis: The Institutional Dilemmas of a Political Union

The euro crisis has radically transformed the institutional and legal configuration of the European Union (EU) as formalized by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty. The crisis has altered the structure of multiple compromises that made the Lisbon Treaty possible. In particular it has altered the institutional compromise between the old supranational and the new intergovernmental approaches. The EU emerging from the crisis has the features of an intergovernmental union, it is based on the euro-area member states and is affected by technocratic, rather than political, criteria. The EU has entered in a constitutional conundrum: how to escape from it? It is necessary to recognize that the euro-area (plus) and no euro-area member states are already separate institutionally and legally. This separation should be formalized and at the same time it is crucial to connect the two areas within the framework of the single market. Regarding the euro-area, the paper argues its necessity to acquire the features of a political union in order to govern the single currency. However, this political union cannot have the features of the traditional perspective of the parliamentary union. The latter cannot offer an exit strategy from the governance’s crisis of the euro, because of institutional dilemmas that it cannot solve. The paper thus identify the institutional features of a political union for the euro-area plus member states able to compound its intergovernmental and supranational sides.