Ferran, Eilís --- "European Banking Union and the EU single financial market: more differentiated integration, or disintegration?" [2017] ELECD 397; in De Witte, Bruno; Ott, Andrea; Vos, Ellen (eds), "Between Flexibility and Disintegration" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 252

Book Title: Between Flexibility and Disintegration

Editor(s): De Witte, Bruno; Ott, Andrea; Vos, Ellen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783475889

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: European Banking Union and the EU single financial market: more differentiated integration, or disintegration?

Author(s): Ferran, Eilís

Number of pages: 30

Abstract/Description:

The European Banking Union (EBU) has been formed inside the EU Single Market and applies only to a subset of the EU Member States, namely the Member States that use the euro (whose participation in EBU is compulsory) and other Member States that choose to opt in. EBU is expected to play an integration-deepening role within the euro area. In the long run, its differentiated, optionality-based approach to Member States outside the euro area could also widen EU integration by serving as a staging post for adoption of the euro by laggard Member States. On the other hand, the advance of integration within the euro area, and prospectively beyond as well, could result in those Member States that remain on the outside of EBU becoming increasingly marginalized within the EU, and the unity of the Single Market could be jeopardized as a result. There is an existing body of scholarship on the causal relation between integration and differentiation. Questions examined include whether differentiated arrangements have centripetal or centrifugal effects on initially unwilling outsiders and whether the institutional flexibility in differentiated integration leads to a ‘positive dynamic of integration, to a negative dynamic of disintegration, or to uneasy and lasting divisions within the Union?’ EBU now provides an important new context for the examination of the effects of differentiation on integration, and for the deepening of theory-based approaches to these issues.