Integrating Macroeconomics into the EU Single Legal Order: The Role of Financial Stability in Post-Crisis Europe

This article follows the trajectory of the EU legal order, from its inception to its current stage, by focusing on the transformations it has experienced resulting from its increasing interaction with macroeconomics. When the Court of Justice declared that a new legal order resulted from the provisions of the Treaty of Rome, its interpretation stemmed from a coherent understanding of the institutional form (indirect administration) and substantive content (microeconomic integra-tion) of European integration. The addition of the macroeconomic layer of integration, with its own institutional form (integrated administration and open method of coordination) but still broadly subject to the same legal order, resulted into a less consistent whole. The crises the Union faced during the last decade tested the resistance of these structures and, although the Court has been consistently interpreting EU law according to the same procedures and tech-niques without radical deviations, the irruption of financial stability as macroeconomic impera-tive has rearranged the equilibrium in integration. Now we can argue that institutional form, substantive content and legal order of European integration are again realigned, but instead of resulting from the provisions of the Treaties and from placing the legal rationality of law at the core of the system, financial stability is the rationale coherently arranging them together. The consequences of this rearrangement for the EU legal order are the object of study of this spe-cial issue.