Chapter 2 moves from the constitutional foundations of the European legal order to the architecture of fiscal federalism constructed atop them. It investigates where the constitutional principles identified in Chapter 1 inhere in the legal architecture of EMU, and explains the basic principles of economics inscribed for their attainment. The principles of fiscal sovereignty, price stability, and fiscal discipline are shown to penetrate three levels of investigation: The travaux préparatoires and the mandate for EMU (Article 119 TFEU); the allocation of competences in economic policy (Articles 2(3) and 5(1) TFEU); and the technical architecture governing public finance itself (Articles 121-126 TFEU). By those provisions, EU fiscal federalism rests on two principles: (1) Fiscal sovereignty – member state economic/fiscal competences remain outside the EU legal order altogether; and (2) market discipline –member states are exposed to ‘hard budget constraints’ and ‘market discipline’ to ensure fiscal discipline.

Chapter 5 opens for Part II of the book with the task of taxonomy, classifying the emergent post-crisis EU fiscal architecture from the perspective of fiscal federalism theory in order to determine what it demands from the EU legal order to ‘work’. Chapter 5 finds that, from the perspective of fiscal federalism theory, the EU has sunk the cornerstones of a highly centralized model of ‘proto-fiscal union’ that is far more apt to unitary states than any of the other federations touched upon in this book. At its core, the new model supplants a legal pillar of fiscal sovereignty and market discipline (an entrenched ‘no-bailout’ law) with a legal feature of unitary states: centralized financial assistance and legal governance of fiscal policy. Chapter 5 evaluates the demands this places on the European legal order, and provides directions for the remainder of the analysis of Part II.