The Material Constitution of the Euro and Emergency Measures

An accepted narrative on the Euro crisis postulates that it offered the chance to transform the EU material constitution via emergency powers. This paper tries to advocate the opposite: emergency actions were required in order to address and contain the negative and destabilizing effects generated by the contradictions afflicting the governance of the Euro. In the first part, we will briefly outline the idea of the material constitution; in the second part, we will reconstruct the main tenets of the material constitution of the Euro-zone and, in the third part, we will show how the measures adopted by the EU and the Member States to address the crisis were utterly functional to its political economy. Finally, we will claim that emergency actions represented a consolidation, rather than a transformation, of the material constitution.