The European responses to the financial and public debt crisis have triggered a process of administrative reorganisation and growth in the governance of the internal market in financial services and economic and monetary union. Such a process is characterised by four main tensions, referring respectively to: the powers conferred on the satellite administrative bodies established in order to tackle the crisis; the jurisdictions of the new administrations; the degree of centralisation which is sought within the new mechanisms for the implementation of EU laws and policies; and to the accountability mechanisms. The effects of such tensions are deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, they might operate as ‘fault lines’ within the EU administrative machinery. On the other hand, by pointing to a host of unsolved issues in EU administrative law, they provide an opportunity for opening a genuine institutional and scientific discussion on the ways in which the EU administrative system should be adjusted or reformed.
