There is a growing sense of crisis in and of the European Union. Crises in Europe range from the immediate economic crisis of the Eurozone to political and cultural crises associated with the rise of right-wing populism and reaction to the perceived failure of state multi-culturalism. Neither...

Does the European Central Bank (‘ECB') have the mandate to do ‘whatever it takes' to save the Euro? While the German Constitutional Court answered the question with a clear ‘no', the European Court of Justice suggested that the ECB did in fact have that mandate. This judicial battle for...

The programme of outright monetary transactions (OMT) announced by the European Central Bank, allowing it to act in effect as a lender of last resort for Eurozone states in financial difficulty, has widely been credited as an economic success. Constitutionally, however, the programme has faced...

Modern public law, according to Martin Loughlin's Foundations of Public Law, depends upon the autonomy of the political realm. This is explained on the basis of an orthodox secularisation thesis of modernity, the autonomy of the political emerging through its successful separation from the...

The original constitution of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) rested on a neoliberal approach to interstate federalism à la Hayek. This approach appealed to political elites at the time of the Maastricht Treaty, promising to overcome the so-called ‘crisis of governability’ of the 1970s and...

Normative political theory is divided on whether questions of distributive justice properly extend beyond the state. From a functionalist perspective, however, justice reflects a balance of material forces, subject to the logics of ‘market' and ‘social' justice, or ‘capitalism' and...

Postwar Europe is partly reconstituted by a fear of democratic freedom, and a desire for political and economic stability. Constitutional relations are transformed over time through a mixture of political authoritarianism and economic liberalism. This takes place in a combination of domestic and...

The historical conjuncture reached in the European Union recalls the spectre of authoritarian liberalism, with politically authoritarian forms of government emerging in defence of practices and ideas associated with economic liberalism. Offering a long view of this formation, the paper traces...