The Legal and Political Accountability Structure of ‘Post‐Crisis’ EU Economic Governance

Abstract How should decision‐making under EU economic governance be understood following the euro‐crisis? This article argues, contra existing depictions, that the post‐crisis EU has increasingly adopted methods of decision‐making in the economic field which marry the decision‐making structure of inter‐governmentalism with the supervisory and implementation framework of the Community Method. While this ‘post‐crisis’ method has arisen for clear reasons – to achieve economic convergence between eurozone states in an environment where previous models of decision‐making were unsuitable or unwanted – it also carries important normative implications. Post‐crisis governance departs from the mechanisms of legal and political accountability present in previous forms of EU decision‐making without substituting new models of accountability in their place. Providing appropriate channels of political and legal control in the EU's ‘new’ economic governance should be seen as a crucial task for the coming decade.