Economic Policy Coordination as a Game Involving Economic Stability and National Sovereignty

The economic crisis has paved the way for reconsideration of the Eurozone's constitutional design. This paper shows that what may seem as a massive empowerment of European institutions at the cost of national economic sovereignty in actual constitutional practice has left economic policy coordination largely unchanged. By means of conceptualising its previous and current patterns as a game between supranational and national institutions, it is shown that the scale of change has been widely exaggerated. The new Eurozone design has mitigated in practice the extent to which national economic sovereignty has been undermined, but only at the cost of shifting to the European Central Bank the burden of shoring up the stability of the common currency; such burden the ECB is bound to prove unable to sustain in the long run.