Banking Union — a stability-oriented macroeconomic or an efficiency-oriented microeconomic project?

ABSTRACT The article analyses the Banking Union from an economic-constitutional perspective. It argues that the areas covered by the Banking Union fall substantively mainly under the internal market area of EU law, where the microeconomic efficiency-based rationales and objectives are essential in legal assessments. In contrast, the euro area macroeconomic and stability-oriented rationales guided the decision on the Banking Union and the allocation of banking supervision to the ECB. The article claims that these different constitutional rationales, and the constitutional locus of the Banking Union, could have implications for the broader constitutional architecture and even for the EU legal order. Indeed, the microeconomic part of the EU economic-constitutional model suits legal approach to integration, but the macroeconomic rationales have a more problematic relation with law and courts. This could call for a resurgence of the internal market perspective in Banking Union going forward to remedy some of the constitutional concerns.