Introduction: During the euro’s sovereign debt crisis, European leaders have become obsessed with rules,
numbers, and pacts. This has reinforced an approach that began with the Maastricht Treaty in
1992, which set out numerical targets for inflation, deficits, and debt for member-states adopting
the Single Currency, was formalized by the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) of 1999, but
accelerated during the Eurozone crisis beginning in 2010. In quick succession EU leaders signed
up for the so-called ‘Six-Pack,’ the ‘Two-Pack,’ and the ‘Fiscal Compact,’ each more stringent
on the nature of the rules, more restrictive with regard to the numbers, and more punitive for
member-states that failed to meet the requirements. In the absence of any deeper political
integration that could provide greater democratic representation and control over an everexpanding
supranational governance, the EU has ended up with ‘governing by the rules’ and
‘ruling by the numbers’ in the Eurozone.
What has become clear as a result of the crisis of the Euro is that the EU is not just missing an
economic union and a fiscal union; it is also missing a political union. During the crisis, the EU
abandoned any pretense to respecting the long-standing ‘democratic settlement’ in which
Commission, Council, and European Parliament all contributed in their different ways to
decision-making via the ‘Community Method.’ Instead, Eurozone governance combined
excessive intergovernmentalism—as EU member-state leaders generated the stability-based rules
in the European Council while treating the Commission largely as a secretariat—with increased
supranationalism. While the ECB pressed the member-states to engage in austerity and structural
reform in a quid pro quo for its own more vigorous monetary interventions, the Commission
gained enhanced budgetary oversight powers to apply the restrictive numerical targets. In all of
this, moreover, the European Parliament was largely sidelined
