Either effective or democratic? : Considerations on the accountability of the European Central Bank
Year: 2016
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In 1985, in his speech on the Single European Act before the first Inter-Governmental Conference, the then President of the European Commission Jacques Délors warned: "we must face the fact that in 30 or 40 years Europe will constitute a UPOa sort of 'unidentified political object'unless we weld it into an entity enabling each of our countries to benefit from the European dimension and to prosper internally as well as hold its own externally" (Commission of the European Communities 1985: 8, emphasis added).The common Europe would thus have found a self-standing political legitimation in its capacity of securing benefits through its actions, first to its Members.Its foundation on "output legitimacy" (Scharpf 1997) is implied by the same subsidiarity principle established in article 5 of the Treaty on European Union, which sets "effectiveness" as the guiding criterion for adjudicating on the proper level of intervention.In the 1990s, a robust scholarly discourse has portrayed this special legitimacy as both a necessity and a natural element of the European institutional architecture.Intentionally designed without the power to lay and collect taxes, the Union was defined as a form of "regulatory state"in which the production of goods is left to providers beyond direct political command, while policy goals, from sustainability to security and growth, lie with independent agencies, following strict mandates to set consistent standards to producers and prevent risky behavior on the basis of expert knowledge (Majone 1994).As the argument went, the delegation of policy competences to such supranational regulators would have provided the Member states with a twofold gain: credible decisions that the vagaries of the domestic political cycle usually make hard or impossible, and the same rules as the committed partners.
Author: A. Damonte
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2620840053