ABSTRACT
Before the crisis, the European Union (EU) had emerged as a major force in global financial governance (GFG). The contributions to this collection examine the different dimensions of the EU’s role in GFG and how they have been affected by the recent crisis. Taking a bird’s eye view, this introduction offers three main arguments. First, the EU has stabilized, rather than challenged, established ideas in and approaches to GFG. Second, the EU continues to be one of two central nodes in GFG, which essentially still is a transatlantic affair – confounding expectations that Europe would find itself in a much more dispersed web of links with other regulatory powers around the world. Third, given its special institutional character, there are signs that a prominent EU may transform the modus operandi of GFG itself, but given present centrifugal forces it remains unclear how pronounced these dynamics will be.
