How to Design a Closer and More Democratic Union

There is no particular need to describe how the compromise on which the birth of the European common currency was based formed the foundation of the current crisis: the common monetary policy was accepted easily by national politicians but turned out to be incompatible with the maintenance of the national control over structural and fiscal policies, as predicted by the work cited in Chapter 2, and with added consequences in financial markets that surprised specialists and policymakers (Pisani-Ferry 2012). This core weakness in the design of the Union is described elegantly by Habermas (2011): member states are functioning as the legislative and executive bodies of the Union, depriving that way the prerogative of power and implementation from the supranational bodies over the national legal systems.