The European Parliament and the eurozone crisis: An exceptional actor?
| Published date | 01 August 2018 |
| Date | 01 August 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118768141 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148118768141
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2018, Vol. 20(3) 632 –651
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148118768141
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The European Parliament
and the eurozone crisis:
An exceptional actor?
Thomas Warren
Abstract
The eurozone crisis has reinvigorated the debate over the requirement for supranational
integration within the single currency area. With the focus of political scientists often restricted to
the study of intergovernmental processes of crisis management, this article considers the role of the
European Parliament during the key legislative negotiations on European Union fiscal governance
reform. A comparative frame analysis of the major European Union institutions’ crisis discourse is
applied. Frames are linked to macroeconomic ideology as well as to different integration scenarios
within Economic and Monetary Union. It is found that the European Parliament converged around
limited framing devices supporting intergovernmental fiscal discipline. Key explanatory factors
here were the ideological divisions among Members of the European Parliament as well as the
leadership role played by the European Council. These findings are broadly consistent with the
new intergovernmentalist claims that the supranational institutions are no longer hard-wired to
the pursuit of supranational integration.
Keywords
European Parliament, eurozone crisis, fiscal governance, intergovernmentalism, ordoliberalism,
supranationalism
Introduction
The focus of this article is on the neglected role of the European Parliament during the
eurozone crisis and its influence in shaping the main legislative initiatives introduced to
reform the European Union’s (EU) fiscal governance framework. Within the field of
political science, the EU’s institutional response to the crisis has been used as evidence to
support the rise of the so-called ‘new intergovernmentalism’ (Bickerton et al., 2015,
2015a). At the heart of this new approach to the study of European integration in the post-
Maastricht phase is the claim that member states are led to ‘pursue more integration but
stubbornly resist further supranationalism’ (Puetter, 2012: 168). When applied to the
School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Corresponding author:
Thomas Warren, School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication, University of East Anglia,
Norwich NR4 7RJ, UK.
Email: thomas.warren@uea.ac.uk
768141BPI0010.1177/1369148118768141The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsWarren
research-article2018
Original Article
Warren 633
eurozone crisis, the focus has been on the shift in decision-making that is said to have
taken place away from the classic Community method in favour of intergovernmental
policy coordination (Fabbrini and Puetter, 2016). The implied assumption from such the-
orising is that the EU’s supranational actors have been relatively weakened in terms of
their executive power and legislative influence.
In several respects, the role of the European Parliament during the eurozone crisis pro-
vides a challenging case study for the new intergovernmentalism. First, it is a notable
coincidence that the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty coincided with the intensification of
the financial and economic crisis in Europe. The Treaty provided a significant boost to the
European Parliament’s role in Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), where traditionally
it was limited to a series of supervision and consultation privileges. The European
Parliament was made ‘co-legislator as regards the setting of detailed rules for multilateral
surveillance’ (Article 121(6) TFEU), and it is now ‘consulted on secondary legislation
implementing the excessive deficit procedure’ (Article 126(14) TFEU). The European
Parliament was therefore able to act as a full co-legislator in the adoption of the so-called
‘six-pack’ and ‘two-pack’ secondary legislative acts and was afforded limited participation
in the negotiation of an overlapping intergovernmental treaty on a ‘fiscal compact’.
Moreover, the European Parliament is also unique in its ability to apply normative argu-
ments concerning its role in conferring democratic legitimacy onto a more deeply inte-
grated single currency area in order to strengthen its own role in EMU (Rittberger, 2014;
Rittberger and Schimmelfennig, 2006). Finally, the reforms specific to EU fiscal govern-
ance have also taken place against a wider expansion of the European Parliament’s viabil-
ity, status, and legislative power across a number of policy competencies (Hix et al., 2007).
This article is sympathetic to the role of ideas and discourse in the study of EMU
(Dyson, 2000; McNamara, 1998). A frame analysis is applied to the European Parliament’s
eurozone crisis reform negotiations on the six-pack and two-pack secondary legislation
approved through co-decision and in the adoption of the intergovernmental fiscal com-
pact treaty which took place outside of the Community method (Goffman, 1974). As a
comparative endeavour, the analysis is also focused on frame construction and interactive
processes within the EU institutions – European Council, Council, Commission, and
European Central Bank (ECB) – as they negotiated with each other to formulate a crisis
response. The different policy frames (‘problem’ and ‘solution’) emerging during the key
legislative negotiations are uncovered. In turn, frames are linked to two models of fiscal
integration: intergovernmental and supranational.1 In addition to facilitating a clarifica-
tion of the different economic and political policy options for reforming the single cur-
rency area, the key role of macroeconomic ideology in guiding policy solutions and in
informing different integration paths within EMU are key aspects here.
Theoretical discussion
Exposed by destabilising economic forces, the incomplete EMU framework institutional-
ised at Maastricht could have been expected to give rise to functional and political ‘spillo-
ver’ and finally a demand for centralised economic integration (Vilpišauskas, 2013).
However, when political scientists have explored the political dynamics of the eurozone
crisis, it has more often figured as a test case to support the claims of the ‘new intergov-
ernmentalism’ (Bickerton et al., 2015, 2015a). Importantly, far from resisting the drift
towards more intergovernmental modes of decision-making, Bickerton et al. (2015: 712)
argue that the supranational institutions have been complicit with these developments:
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