Expert, Stakeholder or Just Politician? New Roles of European Central Bank

The financial crisis has put many of the European actors in situations where they have been able or even forced to take new roles. The constitutional issues involved have mostly been tackled at a relatively superficial level if at all and only by experts. Most of the actions that have created new roles have been based on more or less ad hoc decisions. It is already visible that while many of these decisions have not resulted in their intended consequences they have had a broad list of unintended and unforeseen consequences. In this paper, I will concentrate on the European Central Bank (hereafter ECB when referring to either the ECB or the ESCB as it is the decision-making body for both). It is naturally only part of the complex financial and institutional set-up involved in the financial crisis. However, it is also one of the clearest examples of the constitutional drift in roles and also a potentially unfortunate example of the unintended constitutional and other consequences of these ad hoc decisions. I will first discuss the original intended constitutional position of the ECB as defined by the constitutional principles of the economic and monetary union. Second, I will discuss the three potential roles of administrative bodies: expert, stakeholder and politician. I devote some special attention to the demarcation lines between the roles before turning to the new roles of the ECB. Finally, I will discuss these new roles from the constitutional law and control perspectives. It should not come as a surprise that constitutional control mechanisms envisaged for a limited expert role are hardly sufficient for the roles of a stakeholder or a politician. This also has implications for the democratic legitimacy of the institutions involved, the issue with which I will end my paper. In order to avoid misunderstandings, I am not proposing some specific model for the common central bank nor am I claiming that the current model is value free and based on purely scientific rationales. It clearly is not. However, discussions of the economic and political rationales and merits of various central banking models are totally outside the scope of this paper. I am simply taking the constitutionally stipulated model as given and trying to assess what kind of roles it equipped the central bank with from the point of view of constitutional control and legitimacy. To the extent that these roles are not deemed sufficient, the main route to remedy the situation should be Treaty changes.