ABSTRACT

The present crisis in the euro area is both an economic and a constitutional crisis. In turn, the constitutional implications are not only confined to the economic dimension but reach out to the political and social constitutions as well. The relational concept of a constitution has important consequences for an examination of the Eurozone crisis. The Eurozone crisis exemplifies the particular process-nature of the European constitution: the EU constitutional legislator or constitutional court has played but a peripheral role in the constitutional mutation the crisis has occasioned. This chapter explains the implications that developments in the field of the economic constitution have had for the political dimension. The European process of constitutionalisation does include such manifest, high-profile constitutional speech acts as the Founding Treaties and their amendments. The constitutional crisis is not manifest only in, say, debatable readings of single Treaty provisions but also the teetering of the central Maastricht principles of the macroeconomic constitution.