期刊名称：Collegium : Studies across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences
印刷版ISSN：1796-2986
出版年度：2013
卷号：14
出版社：Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies
摘要：The financ ial crisis has put many of the European actors in situations where they have been able or even forced to take new roles. The constitutional issues involved have mostly been tackled at a relatively super ficial level if at all and only by experts. Most of the actions that have created new roles have been based on more or less ad hoc decisions. It is already visible that while many of these dec isions have not resulted in their intended consequences they have had a broad list of unintended and unforeseen consequences. In this paper, I will concentrate on the European Central Bank (hereafter ECB when referring to either the ECB or the ESCB as it is the decision-making body for both). It is naturally only part of the complex financial and institutional set-up involved in the financial crisis. However, it is also one of the clearest examples of the constitutional drift in roles and also a potentially unfor tunate example of the unintended constitutional and other c onsequences of these ad hoc decisions. I will first discuss the original intended cons titutional position of the ECB as defined by the cons titutional principles of the economic and monetary union. Second, I will discuss the three potential roles of administrative bodies: expert, stakeholder and politician. I devote s ome special at tention to the demarcation lines between the roles before turning to the new roles of the ECB. Finally, I will discuss these new roles from the constitutional law and control perspec tives. It should not come as a surprise that constitutional control mec hanisms envisaged for a limited exper t role are hardly suf ficient for the roles of a stakeholder or a politician. This also has implications for the democratic legitimacy of the institutions involved, the issue with which I will end my paper. In order to avoid misunderstandings, I am not proposing some s pecific model for the c ommon central bank nor am I claiming that the current model is value free and based on purely scientific rationales. It clearly is not. However, discussions of the economic and political rationales and merits of various central banking models are totally outside the scope of this paper. I am simply taking the constitutionally stipulated model as given and trying to assess what kind of roles it equipped the central bank with from the point of view of constitutional control and legitimacy. To the ex tent that these roles are not deemed suf ficient, the main route to remedy the situation should be Treaty changes
