GOVERNING EUROPE’S FINANCIAL MARKETS: ORIGINS, EVOLUTION AND CRITICAL JUNCTURES IN EUROPEAN UNION REGULATION, 1999-2014

Abstract

The 2008-2009 global financial crisis, and the protracted European sovereign debt and banking crisis that followed, re-shaped the institutions that govern Europe’s financial system. Despite demands for comprehensive and integrated reform, patterns of regulatory change varied significantly across core elements of the financial system. Through case studies of the banking, securities, insurance and pensions sectors, this study documents the emergence of a patchwork of European financial regulatory institutions that entail new divisions in the responsibilities held by the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and domestic governments. Employing an historical institutional framework, the study finds that the distribution of financial regulatory authority between member states and the European Union preceding the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis was instrumental in shaping changes to EU regulatory institutions during and in the immediate aftermath of the crises. Sectoral variation in levels of regulatory integration among member states prior to the crises shaped state preferences and predisposed institutions to particular patterns of institutional change. Where high levels of regulatory integration existed before the crisis, EU institutions expanded through a process of institutional layering, gradually hardening enforcement mechanisms, extending regulation to new markets, and issuing more binding technical standards. This contrasts with the displacement in the locus of supervisory authority experienced in the creation of a European banking union in 2013, in which supervisory control over eurozone banks was transferred from domestic authorities to the ECB. Low-levels of regulatory integration are found to have been a necessary condition for this transformative change to occur, while the protracted eurozone sovereign debt crisis is found to have provided a period of heightened contingency during which the ECB was able to exert significant political agency at the European Council to effect the resulting shift. In explaining the emergence of a complex financial regulatory system in Europe after 2008, the study contributes to deeper understanding of the political processes that shape the evolution and integration of national and international institutions of economic governance in the early 21st century.