Are Supranational Institutions Still the Motor of European Integration? The Case of the European Central Bank
Dermot Hodson, Birkbeck College, University of London
The European Central Bank is a puzzling case for students of European Integration. On the one hand, the Bank’s launch in May 1998 represented a high-water mark for the traditional community method, involving as it did the delegation of significant policy-making powers to a highly independent supranational actor. On the other had, the Bank behaved most unlike an archetypal supranational institution during its first decade, demonstrating as it did a distinct uneasiness about initiatives designed to extend the scope of European integration. This paper considers two broad explanations of this puzzle, both of which have implications for our understanding of EU policy-making more generally. The first sees the European Central Bank as a specialist supranational agency whose integrationist zeal is tempered by the narrow scope of its mandate and hence as a model for member states that are wary of getting ‘more Europe’ than they bargained for. The second sees the European Central Bank as being symptomatic of the fact that supranational institutions are less positively disposed towards the pursuit of ever-closer union than scholars previously thought.