SOLIDARITY IN
THE EUROZONE
Pavlos Eleftheriadis
University of Oxford
Abstract:
Proposals for Eurozone reform aim to complete its
institutional architecture by securing stability without creating moral hazard.
Such policy arguments inevitably rely, however, on implicit assumptions about justice,
or on what is owed to whom. A common assumption is that member states are solely
responsible for what happens to them. This paper, written from the point of view
of public law and legal theory, asks if this assumption is correct. The
relevant idea is often considered to be that of solidarity. Yet, solidarity is
a puzzling concept. Although it is mentioned in the EU treaties, it does not appear
to create any clear duties of mutual assistance. Many prominent legal theorists
argue that solidarity will only become relevant in the future, when new European
institutions bring citizens together under a single Europe-wide political
community. This paper argues, however, that these arguments are misleading.
They are at least incomplete in that they miss the key role played by corrective
justice. Unlike distributive justice, which applies within states but not among
states, corrective justice applies to cooperative arrangements creating
interdependence. Corrective justice creates a principle of redress, which requires
that those who are unfairly burdened by an agreement should be compensated by
those who caused the unfairness. Any state that was unfairly burdened by the
Eurozone’s flawed architecture, may thus have a claim of redress for the losses
it incurred as a result of the unfairness. It follows that the programmes of
financial assistance were not merely actions of self-preservation or prudence by
the Eurozone. They were also manifestations of an existing European principle
of solidarity based on corrective justice.
Keywords: Eurozone, fairness, corrective justice, distributive justice, European
Stability Mechanism, European Union treaties, solidarity.
JEL Classifications: K12, K42, N10, N20.
Acknowledgements: I am very grateful to Menelaos Markakis and Michalis Ioannidis for their
very useful comments on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to Christina
Tsochatzi, Heather Gibson, Dimitris Malliaropoulos, Christos Hadjiemmanuil and
the research team at the Bank of Greece for their comments and discussions in a
series of three seminars I gave while I was a visiting research fellow there in
2017-2018.
Correspondence:
Pavlos Eleftheriadis
Professor of Public Law
University of Oxford
Mansfield College
Oxford OX1 3TF,
United
Kingdom