ABSTRACT
This chapter retraces the Eurogroup’s institutional evolution after 2010. It explains why the group has been one the main beneficiaries of the institutional shifts during the crisis. Under immense time constraints, the Eurogroup could remove aspects of regulation – state investment, taxation, wage relations, and national competition rules – from the national context and centralize them. This went hand in hand with a substantial expansion of the group’s competences in the fields of fiscal and macroeconomic surveillance, program negotiations, emergency lending, and institutional reform. The chapter argues that this entailed a deepening of the EMU’s ordoliberal character. Informality also allowed the Eurogroup to incorporate the IMF and the ESM, both strongly involved in emergency lending. The group furthermore guaranteed a confidential environment for emergency debates between the EMU’s main actors. In consequence, between 2010 and 2018, the Eurogroup has been the center of power in European economic governance.
