Courts, Central Banks and Bureaucracies in the Eurozone Crisis

While the recent Eurozone crisis has triggered a series of inter-governmental summits at the highest political level, it has resulted essentially into the limiting of governments’ margins of manoeuver through the creation of new independent supranational institutions and procedures (the troïka, the European Stability Mechanism, the Banking Union System, etc.). In addressing this paradox, this paper suggests that the appeal of independence has particularly deep-seated roots in the context of EU polity whereby ‘independence’ has historically been the language through which supranational institutions such as the European Court of Justice, the Commission, and later the European Central Bank have been staged, shaped and legitimised. With these historical lenses, this paper seeks to provide a fresh outlook on the transnational politics of independence that has emerged over the past five years across institutions such as the European Central Bank, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the German Constitutional court and the European Commission.