This chapter explores the role accorded to the principle of equality of Member States in the case law of the Court of Justice and national courts reviewing measures of financial assistance. At the same time, it investigates the extent to which the common interest, as the expression of the principle of solidarity, features as a consideration before those courts. The chapter opens with a brief description of financial assistance measures to gain a sense of how their versatile nature influenced judicial review. It then analyses judicial review of the European Stability Mechanism and the resulting Memoranda of Understanding at the national level in respect of access, remedies, and the interpretation of the principles of solidarity and equality. An analogous exercise is then conducted in respect of the EU courts. The chapter lastly reflects upon judicial interactions taking place between the EU and the national level and comments on the overall status of legal accountability in the EU judicial space.

Affected by the financial crisis and in order to receive financial assistance, several EU member states had to adopt structural adjustment programmes aiming at the reduction of public expenditures. Despite their differences, common feature of all financial assistance schemes was the combination of supranational and international legal instruments and institutions. Newly created financial assistance mechanisms, such as the EFSF and ESM, were created under international law and all financial assistance packages included the participation of the IMF. This hybrid nature of European financial assistance raises the question of whether the actors involved in the award of the assistance are bound by EU human rights. Against this background, this chapter first exposes the doubtful legitimacy of European financial assistance. Second, it analyses the CJEU case law on financial assistance conditionality from a human rights perspective, aiming to respond to the question of whether European actors were and could be bound by human rights when preparing financial assistance conditions. Third, it investigates the possibility of conceiving a legitimate role for courts in applying the procedural and substantive dimension of human rights accountability in times of crisis.

The late 2000s Eurozone crisis has constituted the cause for an extensive overhaul of the EU’s, and primarily the Eurozone’s, modus operandi. The modifications introduced include reinforced budgetary discipline and enhanced fiscal surveillance framework, but also substantial delegation of decision-making authority from the national to the supranational level. The changes are so extensive that this could be described as a fourth stage of economic and monetary union, or a Eurozone 2.0. The aim of the adopted measures has been argued to be a more economically sustainable development. This chapter analyses whether this has been the case. Have these measures created a more sustainable economic environment? Of particular interest is the criticism that the Eurozone suffers from severe socio-economic and cultural imbalances that render the entire project unsustainable. It is found that the changes introduced into the EU framework during the crisis have attempted to create a more cohesive and integrated Eurozone/EU, both economically and politically, but that it is highly doubtful whether such changes promote an efficient and sustainable model of economic governance.

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.

Chapter 6 examines whether the instruments of conditional financial assistance enacted since the crisis are genuinely reconcilable with the boundaries of EMU inscribed in the Treaties as a matter of EU law. This is necessary because the text of the Treaty is but the litmus paper for determining whether a legal instrument coheres with much deeper constitutional boundaries underlying the EU legal order. It concludes, unavoidably, that conditional financial assistance under Article 136(3) TFEU and the ESM is simply not reconcilable with the legal architecture in the treaties under the analytical framework developed by the ECJ. This emerges from an analysis of the allocation of competences (within which it does not together sit) and the substantive provisions of Articles 121-126 TFEU (to which it does not adhere). This provides the first testable indication that the emerging new model is incompatible with much deeper the boundaries underlying the EU legal order.

This Chapter provides an illustration of the trends and dynamics discussed in the previous chapters through a comprehensive and contextualised examination of the specific, but paradigmatic, Greek debt crisis, arguing that, in this case as well, both the responses devised by national and supranational institutions, and their scrutiny by some human rights monitoring bodies in particular, seem to reflect an increasingly neoliberalised conception of human rights and of the debt-ESR relationship

Chapter 4 examines how the entanglement between care and control transforms aid into a tool that filters marginalisation without directly excluding migrants from basic service provision. By looking at projects providing social assistance to migrants living in the big Moroccan urban centres, I argue that aid rather mediates the marginalisation of migrants through their inclusion in a parallel network of care. Developing in the interstices of a tight border and of an indifferent Moroccan state, this care is volatile: it rests on bureaucratised logics of filtering that normalise the abandonment of migrants. This care is also unaccountable: the actors providing assistance enact mechanisms which allow them not to see themselves as responsible for migrants’ grievances.

In this chapter, we examine the law relating to corporate finance, focusing on share and debt finance. We examine the nature of share finance (including different types of shares), the different forms of debt finance (including debentures), and the nature of security interests. We consider share capital transactions including dividends, alterations and reduction of capital, share buy-backs and financial assistance transactions. This area of corporate law uses some specific terminology. We define these terms in the text; other sources, such as legal and business glossaries, may also assist.

This chapter discusses the initiation of the euro’s transformation and the shift from negative to positive solidarity, in the form of financial assistance, that it caused. Its origin lies in a historical meeting of the heads of state or government on 11 February 2010. There, the leaders initiated a change in the Founding Contract by jointly committing themselves to safeguard the currency union’s financial stability. The chapter subsequently focuses on the positive solidarity displayed towards distressed member states through various temporary rescue funds. This not only created difficulties for political leaders back home, politically and legally, it also put great strain on the single currency’s legal set-up that still reflected a stability conception from the past. The third part of the chapter therefore discusses how member states tried to take away this strain by incorporating the shift in solidarity in Union law through the creation of Article 136(3) TFEU, allowing member states in the currency union to establish a permanent rescue mechanism. The chapter traces the process and considerations behind both this amendment and the establishment of the mechanism it enabled.

This prologue sets the scene by introducing the book’s main thesis that during the debt crisis, in particular, the years 2010-2012, the European Union has gone through a constitutional transformation. The transformation is characterised by a broadening of the currency union’s conception of stability. Its key manifestations are financial assistance for distressed member states and government bond purchases by the European Central Bank. The transformation can be understood through the lens of solidarity as this makes it possible to conceptualise the unity between the member states and to analyse how political leaders managed to uphold this unity during the crisis. And ultimately, it allows for an understanding of why instead of approving the transformation in Pringle and Gauweiler on the merits, the ECJ should have done so through silence.