Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

This chapter focuses on transnational solidarity conflicts, that is, a new type of distributional conflict which encompasses both quarrels about the adaptation of domestic welfare systems to EMU requirements and the distribution of costs and benefits between Member States. It seeks to understand how constitutional accountability may contribute to constructive management of such conflicts. In addressing this question, the chapter focuses specifically on the accountability goods of openness and publicness. It analyses the case law of the German and the Portuguese constitutional court as well as of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) following the Eurozone crisis. Domestic courts applied mostly a deductive approach to accountability in the EMU and thereby also tended to ‘nationalise’ transnational solidarity conflicts rather than acknowledge their European dimension. By contrast, the CJEU made the European constitutional dimension visible, thereby contributing more to openness. However, by focusing mostly on economic constitutional values, while only hesitantly applying other constitutional values such as social rights as a benchmark for substantive accountability it ensured publicness only to a limited extent. In conclusion, both domestic and European constitutional accountability mechanisms did not ensure meaningful accountability in the sense of concretizing and re-negotiating constitutional common goods.

On 2 May 2010, the Eurogroup and the International Monetary Fund agreed to a three-year €110 billion loan to Greece (which was deprived from the private capital markets) in order to avoid a sovereign default. The loan was conditional on the implementation of austerity measures to restore the fiscal balance, privatisation of government assets to keep the debt pile sustainable as well as implementation of structural reforms to improve competitiveness and growth prospects. In October 2011, Eurozone leaders consequently agreed to offer a second €130 billion loan for Greece, conditional not only on the implementation of another austerity package (combined with the continued demands for privatization and structural reforms outlined in the first programme), but also on a restructuring of all Greek public debt held by private creditors. In August 2015, a third programme was agreed, offering Greece an additional €86 billion loan. In 2018, the third programme was concluded. Does this delay reflect the failure of economic adjustment programmes in the case of Greece? The purpose of this chapter is to answer this question.

In his chapter Nicholas Haagensen seeks to articulate the processes of legal construction and elaboration in a novel area of EU financial and monetary law. Using qualitative methods, he explains how EU lawyers, first, built a novel legal structure – the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) – during the Eurozone crisis in the years 2010 to 2012, and second, how they defended their construction before the CJEU. While attempting to resolve the legal tensions arising between the EU legal order and the ESM legal framework, the CJEU backed the mutation of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) with its ruling in the Pringle judgement. The establishment of the ESM – an international financial institution – outside EMU, while still being intimately connected to the EU legal order, instigated a mutation of EMU through the introduction of international law modalities into its EU law foundations. Drawing on interviews with lawyers from the European Commission, the Council, the European Parliament and the ECB, as well as the legal observations of all the parties to the Pringle case, the chapter explains and maps the process of legal construction and elaboration of changes to the EMU legal structure.

This Chapter provides a general definition of sovereign debt, and illustrates the trend, dating back to the 1970s, of rising global public indebtedness, including in advanced economies, to reflect on the actual role of debt in the current global economic system. It then analyses the main elements of the post-crisis reform of the legal framework for economic and fiscal policy making in the European Economic and Monetary Union (a reform linked, inter alia, to the intensified need to subject the fiscal conduct of increasingly indebted states to stricter controls), and discusses how these seem to evidence the increased neoliberalisation of EU economic governance.

The EU is cloaked in expressions of solidarity. Despite the fundamental role that solidarity plays, cracks have appeared and become more evident across Member States. The euro – a transnational single currency – was a bold endeavour when first established, and its adoption was expected to generate a leap forward for by making European integration stronger, and more resilient. The prolonged battle of the sovereign debt crisis that emerged in 2009 tested the limits of solidarity: a confrontation waged on multiple levels, playing into constitutional frameworks and socio-economic divisions, and exacerbating fault-lines between states. Yet despite frequent arguments made to the contrary, solidarity was a feature of the financial crisis, albeit of a particular kind. The legitimate expectation of what role different concepts of solidarity ought to have played (particularly where fiscal redistribution is concerned), compared to the role it actually served, ensured that an expectations deficit opened. This chapter examines solidarity within the EU’s legal framework in the context of the Eurozone crisis. It analyses the ramifications of the idea of solidarity, variously defined, and the implications it may have for the future direction of the Union as it faces ever-greater challenges.

Chapter 6 examines severe and protracted economic contractions following the Great Recession of 2008–09 in two countries on the European periphery: Latvia and Greece. It documents the evolution of main macroeconomic aggregates and social indicators in these two countries before, during, and after the 2008–09 crisis. The chapter also critically examines the role played by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other European institutions in the design and implementation of austerity in these economies, and draws lessons for other nations from these two experiences. The chapter also discusses the futility of democratic consultation (referendums) in Greece for the amelioration of conditionality and austerity.