Executive Power in the European Union: The Implications of the Euro Crisis

Introduction: The euro crisis has brought to the full affirmation of the intergovernmental approach to economic governance. Indeed, in the negotiations that led to the 1992 Maastricht Treaty emerged a clear alternative perspective to the Community method (characterized by the Commission’s monopoly of legislative initiative and legislative co-decisional power of the Council and the European parliament or EP on Commission’s proposals) for dealing with the new issues of foreign, security and economic policies (inter alia). That perspective had an intergovernmental character and soon acquired the form of a specific constitutional model or decision-making regime. Since the Maastricht Treaty, the member state governments accepted to Europeanize those issues traditionally close to national sovereignty, but at the same time they decided that their Europeanization would have not implied the strengthening of the supranational institutions (the Commission, the European Court of Justice or ECJ and the EP). Those policies have thus come to be decided within the circuit of the Council of Ministers or Council and the informal European Council. The intergovernmental decisions have taken the form of political, rather than legal, acts. If the Community method has epitomized the principle of integration through law, the intergovernmental method has advanced the alternative project of an integration based on voluntary policy coordination between national governments within Brussels’ intergovernmental institutions. The intergovernmental constitution was thus fully institutionalized by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty that has finally recognized the European Council as formal executive institution of the EU, chaired by a permanent president elected by the latter’s members