EMU Integration and Member States’ Constitutions

In this book, legal scholars from the EU Member States (with the addition of the UK) analyse the development of the EU Member States’ attitudes to economic, fiscal, and monetary integration since the Treaty of Maastricht. The Eurozone crisis corroborated the warnings of economists that weak economic policy coordination and loose fiscal oversight would be insufficient to stabilise the monetary union. The chapters in this book investigate the legal, and in particular the constitutional, pre-conditions for deeper fiscal and monetary integration that influenced the past and might impact on the future positions in the (now) 27 EU Member States. The individual country studies address the following issues: Main characteristics of the national constitutional system, and constitutional culture; Constitutional foundations of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) membership and related instruments; Constitutional obstacles to EMU integration; Constitutional rules and/or practice on implementing EMU-related law; Resulting relationship between EMU-related law and national law.