A historical institutionalist explanation of the EU's responses to the euro area financial crisis

By A. Verdun. 2015

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT How can we understand the European Union's responses to the euro area financial crisis? This contribution examines this question through a historical institutionalist (HI) lens. First it reviews the design of existing institutions. With the help of HI it examines what challenges the institutional design posed on the European Union (EU) when the crisis hit. Next, the responses to the crisis by member state leaders and by EU-level actors are reviewed. An analysis is made of selected new EU institutions created to address the crisis: the European Financial Stability Facility; the European Stability Mechanism; the Six-Pack and Two-Pack; the European Semester; and the Fiscal Compact. Four ideal types – ‘displacement’, ‘layering’, ‘drift’ and ‘conversion’ – are examined and found not to fit well. In some cases institutions were ‘layered’ on top of existing institutions. Perhaps an amendment could be made by offering the ideal type ‘copying’ in those cases where new institutions that borrow from earlier institutions. Although no complex problem can be truly understood by looking at it through one single theoretical lens, this contribution argues that a large of part of the problems that emerged, and the solutions adopted, can be understood by examining it through an HI lens.

Subfields: Finance, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7aaf80bfd83ce54ae9308ba228ca0b8b509c3b35

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Citations in the corpus

European integration and the crisis: practice and theory (2015, methodology): “Herein, Amy Verdun (2015) uses the lens of historical institutionalism (HI) to analyse the institutional choices that were made in response to the crisis.”
Crisis, learning and policy change in the European Union (2017, background): “…initially to deal with the immediate crises of the day, as individual member states were uncertain what steps had to be taken at that level, given the speed of the unfolding crisis the limited budget of the EU and the lack of response mechanisms catering to this kind of crisis’ (Verdun 2015: 219).”
Liberal intergovernmentalism and the euro area crisis (2015, background): “…the common interest of EA countries in preserving and stabilizing the euro and their preparedness to engage in institutional reforms strengthening the credibility of their commitment to the euro is best explained as endogenous to the previous decision to create a common currency (Verdun 2015).”
Building a hidden investment state? The European Investment Bank, national development banks and European economic governance (2019, background): “It presents a case for thinking about the gradual ways of institution building, tie-knotting and network formation in the field of economic policy-making, as well as the historical pathway to the EU’s crisis responses (Verdun 2015).”