Video: Schmidt Talks Eurozone in Dublin
Vivien Schmidt, Jean Monnet Professor of European Integration at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke about the Eurozone Crisis at a recent event held at University College in Dublin, Ireland.
“Understanding the Eurozone Crisis Seminar Series” (Autumn 2015) was co-hosted by UCD Dublin European Institute, UCD College of Social Sciences and Law, UCD College of Business and UCD Industrial Relations and Human Resources Group. Schmidt presented on the topic of “The Euro Crisis of Governance: Legitimacy at Risk?” Her talk took place on Nov. 16, and the video was published on Nov. 25.
From the event write-up originally published on the Center for the Study of Europe, of which Schmidt is the Director:
Schmidt’s UCD lecture draws on a report that she recently prepared for the European Commission. The EU’s economic crisis has generated a crisis of democratic legitimacy, as deteriorating economics and increasingly volatile politics have combined with restrictive governance processes focused on ‘governing by the rules and ruling by the numbers.’ Using the systems related terms of democratic theory, this paper first analyzes this legitimacy crisis in terms of problems with the ‘output’ performance of EU policies, the EU’s responsiveness to European citizens’ political ‘input,’ and the quality of the EU’s ‘throughput’ processes. It then considers how these play out for EU institutional actors—including in turn the ECB, the Council, the Commission, and the EP. The paper’s overall argument is that EU actors have sought to fix the economics and calm the politics by progressively reinterpreting the rules without admitting it in the discourse, and that such reinterpretation ‘by stealth,’ although perhaps beneficial for output legitimacy, risks generating further problems for input and throughput legitimacy.
You can read the entire write-up here.
Schmidt’s research focuses on European political economy, institutions, democracy, and political theory. Recent books include Resilient Liberalism in Europe’s Political Economy (co-edited, 2013), Debating Political Identity and Legitimacy in the European Union (co-edited, 2011), Democracy in Europe (2006)—named in 2015 by the European Parliament as one of the ‘100 Books on Europe to Remember’—and The Futures of European Capitalism (2002). Learn more about her here.