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THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION
36
Fund (IMF), which provided additional liquidity
and experience in crisis management, and the
European Central Bank (ECB). The IMF does not
answer for its action to the European Parlia-
ment. The ECB is only partially accountable,
through an inter-institutional agreement that
requires periodical appearances before the
chamber, annual reports and replying to written
questions on an ongoing basis. Lastly, the con-
trol that could potentially be exercised over the
Commission was much smaller, given the com-
plex institutional design of the bailouts funded
in one way or another by the Eurogroup.
Meanwhile, the national parliaments per-
formed part of the oversight role, in that the
Member States provided cash to those funds
and, for example, the Finnish Parliament re-
quired its government to sign bilateral insurance
with the Kingdom of Spain before giving the
go-ahead to the rescue in the summer of 2012.
In any event, the dispersion of the executors
of the rescue programmes and the different
sources of funding have prevented effective
control by the European Parliament so far.
Moreover, insomuch as the Eurogroup is still an
informal institution, there were no accountabil-
ity protocols in place previously either. So the
absence of a community method in all this
stopped the Parliament from playing a central
role in the design and oversight of the Euro-
group’s activities, both in its regular functioning
and in its mission in the bailouts of certain Euro-
zone states.
At the same time, Europe has also made pro-
gress on fiscal issues, but far removed from the
model of accountability to the Parliament on a
central issue in any democracy. While the Euro-
zone members promoted rescue channels that
have become permanent, the Union in turn
stepped up control over the leeway of Member
States’ budgetary policies. This greater control
has been the price to pay in return for the im-
plementation of bailouts that, in principle, were
prohibited by Treaties that it was necessary to
reform.
The EU has adopted two legislative packages
known as the Six Pack (2011) and the Two Pack
(2013), which, without wishing to go into either
issue in depth, significantly step up budgetary
control over Member States. For example, the
States must now submit their draft budgets to
the Commission prior to approval by their na-
tional parliaments and the Commission can re-
quest a review if it believes that they will not
meet the agreed deficit targets. What’s more, it
raises the ex post cost of missing the targets,
introducing automatic fines and conferring the
Commission executive capacity over national
governments to impose measures aimed at
meeting those goals.
Once again the Parliament that had to pro-
cess and adopt all the legislative initiatives intro-
duced in the two packages has been denied real
control over the Commission’s activities on
these matters. So even when there has been
progress in the federalisation of the fiscal poli-
cies of the Member States, that process has
been carried out without appropriate account-
ability to the European Parliament. This was ac-
cepted by the chamber itself in the last term,
when, incidentally, there was a very broad con-
servative majority, thus reducing the lobbying
capacity of the Socialists & Democrats group,
which is always more inclined toward a federal
and democratic design.
As well as this new legislation, all the Mem-
ber States, except for the United Kingdom and
the Czech Republic, signed the Treaty on Stabil-
ity, Coordination and Governance in the Eco-
nomic and Monetary Union in 2012. This treaty
complements the Stability and Growth Pact,
introducing greater budgetary control and