European Integration in the Constitutional Borderlands

This book examines how the EU's Covid-19 response, NextGenerationEU, reshaped the Union's trajectory and democratic governance. While fulfilling long-term institutional goals, it narrowed national parliaments' role and left integration stuck in 'constitutional borderlands,' lacking the capacity to meet current challenges. The European Union now finds itself in a liminal space-a 'constitutional borderlands'-between its traditional role as a prodigious producer of regulatory norms and a nascent, yet incomplete, role that seeks to develop fiscal capacities to achieve its goals. The NextGenerationEU (NGEU) programme adopted in the wake of Covid is at the heart of this shift. It defined a new model of non-transparent, executive-technocratic governance that was then repurposed to address the many challenges of the Russian war on Ukraine as well as other pressing needs. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the design, implementation, and evolution of the NGEU model from its inception to today. It subjects the model's hidden mechanics to a critical examination, exposing the pivotal role of EU institutional legal advisers, operating behind closed doors, in facilitating revolutionary reinterpretations of the Treaties that effectively bypassed the democratic process to transform the nature of European governance. It shows that the advent of the NGEU model has had profound distributive and democratic consequences, shifting power toward executive and subordinate technocratic actors while sidelining parliamentary oversight and the involvement of other stakeholders. At the same time, the NGEU model created misaligned incentives, often prioritizing national spending envelopes over the production of genuine European public goods. These 'emergency' measures are fast…