Title Safeguarding the euro area: how politics of conditionality and financial markets affect crisis management roles of the ECB and the ECJ /
Translation of Title Gelbėjant euro zoną: kaip sąlygų politika ir finansų rinkos veikė Europos centrinio banko ir Europos teisingumo teismo vaidmenis krizių valdyme.
Authors Bernatavičius, Marijus
DOI 10.15388/vu.thesis.487
Full Text Download
Pages 100
Keywords [eng] European Central Bank ; European Court of Justice ; Liberal intergovernmentalism, neofunctionalism ; Economic and Monetary Union
Abstract [eng] This dissertation shall examine six key decisions of the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ) taken during the debt crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, and will introduce the new synthetic approach on how to interpret them: 1) the ECB’s decision to launch the Outright Monetary Transactions (OMT) program; 2) the ECB’s decision not to suspend liquidity provision to the Greek banks; 3) the ECJ’s positive ruling on the legality of the European Stability Mechanism; 4) the ECJ’s positive ruling on the legality of the ECB’s OMT program; 5) the statement by the President of the ECB declaring that there is no need to close the sovereign bond spreads between euro area member states; and 6) the ECB’s decision to launch the Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme. Two main streams of integration theories, based on functionalism and intergovernmentalism discuss the role of governments vs. supranational institutions in the integration process. The proposed new synthetic approach would allow coexistence of the main integration theories in the one model analysing the sovereign debt and the COVID-19 crisis responses. The two main independent variables of the new model are proposed to be the risk of contagion from the sovereign debt markets (financial market pressure), and the indirect political pressure stemming from the Crisis Management Mechanism (CMM) designed by euro area governments (mostly, creditor countries). The CMM is the proposed new term explaining the crisis management strategy pursued by euro area governments since the sovereign debt crisis. It was underpinned by the fiscal consolidation and structural reform policies ‘in exchange’ for subsidized financial resources from the euro area rescue funds.
Dissertation Institution Vilniaus universitetas.
Type Doctoral thesis
Language English
Publication date 2023