The Charisma of the European Central Bank: From Political Sacrifice to Monetary Rituals

Abstract

The article expands Paul Kahn’s cultural analysis of the US Supreme Court’s charisma to EU institutions and, in particular, to the European Central Bank. The aim is twofold: on the one hand, the intention is to show the rich potential of the cultural study of law for understanding different constitutional experiences; on the other hand, the aim is to show that political sacrifice may not be the only material for building constitutional imagination. As the analysis of the ECB’s unconventional intervention into the Euro-crisis tries to establish, other forms of sacrifice might be conjured up, in a context where the constitutional order is held together more by rituals rather than violent commitments. Although the ECB does not enjoy sovereign authority, it has been able to maintain stable (though at a high price, not only metaphorically) the eurozone legal order.