The EMU and the internal market during the economic crisis – building bridges over troubled waters?

In Chapter 5, Janne Salminen, Senior Lecturer in law at the University of Turku, merges and builds upon the EMU and internal market analyses of Strupczewski, Lahti and Faull. Salminen shows how the crisis has been handled in many different ways, which illustrates the astounding ability of the EU’s legal framework to react to crises, often even without revising the Treaties. The law on economic and fiscal coordination as amended stretches however the constitutional limits of the Treaties. Where the Lisbon Treaty no longer is capable of offering the prerequisite legal basis, international agreements are used as the legal framework instead. This technique is evident both in the field of stabilization mechanisms and in the field of economic and fiscal governance. These developments lead in Salminen’s view nonetheless to issues of constitutionality, transparency and clarity. Institutionally speaking, the European Parliament’s limited role is problematic, while the Council and the European Council have taken a central role at the European Union level in actively seeking solutions to the crisis. Undoubtedly, the new means of economic and fiscal governance that the crisis has triggered have also strengthened the powers of the European executive, the Commission. The role of the European Central Bank has also been growing, sometimes in somewhat unconventional ways.