Putting the Cart before the Horse? A critical appraisal of the European Finance Minister idea

The key argument of the contribution is that the ex nihilo creation of a statelike figure such as a European Finance Minister in a political system as post-modern as the European Union is a worrisome choice; especially in the form proposed by the European Commission in its 2017 package on completing EMU. Such a new institutional position would indeed go against both letter and spirit of the Maastricht Treaty as it would constitute a radical change of economic policy cooperation paradigm in EMU. Setting up a Finance Minister position would precipitate and formalize the departure from a rules-based, fragmented and thin fiscal union – which we refer to as a coordination model – towards a thick fiscal union relying on centralized and concentrated discretionary power – i.e. a model based on a central economic policy authority which we refer to as fiscal federalism. The empowerment of a Finance Minister would therefore undo the Maastricht logic of fiscal policy coordination and would set EMU on the trajectory of fiscal federalism , a path which was however unambiguously discarded by Maastricht Treaty designers.