Transnational Republicanism and in the European Monetary Union

By mirroring the ethos of the Stability and Growth Pact, the ECB’s new Transmission Policy Instrument fundamentally raises the stakes of EMU macroeconomic governance. The ECB will now look to what happens in the Council before deciding how much support to give to a Member State with financial problems. The risk of a Member State losing monetary support as a result of a political decision by the Council– raises a key question: how should economic and monetary relations among Member States and between them and the European Central Bank be organised, so that any influence and interference in their economic and financial policies is not seen as dominating? This paper suggests that ‘transnational republicanism’ offers a convincing answer to this question though a conceptual analysis of domination and its application to the EMU framework. First, it conceptualises the minimisation of dominating relationships at the international-level as a struggle between different institutional strategies. Second, it reconstructs how different institutional frameworks of macroeconomic governance tried to manage this tension and, third, it identifies which institutional configuration should manage it at the current juncture. In particular, it assigns a key role to citizens’ democratic participation in the rebalancing of the EMU architecture of macroeconomic governance.