Macroeconomic Sovereignty in the European Economic and Monetary Union: A Republican Approach
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The Economic and Monetary Union has fundamentally changed how fiscal and monetary powers are exercised over democratic publics which raise the question of whether a normative vision of macroeconomic sovereignty is compatible with membership within the Eurozone. After conceptualising sovereignty in republican terms as the balance between four ‘power-countering strategies’, this article conducts a normative analysis of the evolution of Economic and Monetary Union governance. This exercise shows how – by neglecting one of the four republican strategies, namely to increase citizens’ democratic participation at the European Union level – successive institutional innovations as well as recent proposals fail to make the exercise of public powers compatible with citizens’ status equality. In contrast, the argument suggests that if citizens’ influence is channelled through a ‘system of dual partisanship’, in which national and European parliamentarians coordinate their activities, national and Economic and Monetary Union’ executives’ discretion can be democratically controlled.
Source: Political Studies
Author: Stefano Merlo
Institutions: University College London, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4403686591