“Policies, Institutions and the Euro: Dilemmas of Legitimacy and Democratic Control”

Accepting the underlying political nature of the monetary union project, this paper seeks to question the foundations of its legitimacy, and investigate the problems connected with democratic control under an EMU regime. In doing so, we suggest that current and future problems of legitimation of the single currency can be explained as follows. On the one hand, EMU rests on the creation of a set of powerful institutions with direct and executive authority in an area of policy-making, i.e. monetary policy, which is generally regarded as elementary to the governance of modern economy and society. On the other hand, the establishment of important and autonomous institutions at the European level precedes the emergence of a political community in which such decisions, or, more significantly, the procedures for the taking of such decisions, can be grounded. Indeed, as remarked at the outset, EMU is specifically designed to contribute to the emergence of such a polity