The genie of independence and the European bottle: How independence became Europe’s most contentious legal and political category

Abstract

Abstract Over the past decades, the notion of “independence” has become an object of contention in EU politics in fields ranging from monetary policies to rule-of-law standards, to regulatory agencies. This article takes a broad socio-genetic approach to question the deep-seated, cross-sectoral entanglement between EU polity and the notion of “independence.” It explains how the European Union has been a laboratory of the notion of “independence,” transforming it from a negative institutional device (independence from) into a broad empowering technology of supranational government connected to notions of general interest, professional expertise, and discretionary powers (independence for). The article analyzes the emergence of this European style of independence in conjunction with the jurisdictional claims and legitimizing efforts of the European Court of Justice (“the Court”), the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. The article examines three major EU constitutional crises from the inaugural years of the mid-1960s to the creation of an uber-independent European Central Bank in the 1990s and the more recent debates on judicial independence, and it traces how a controversy on the meaning and scope of independence unfolded in each of these critical junctures. The article is meant to spark a productive debate about Europe’s “independence wars” in view of framing a more robust, yet democratically open, notion of independence to which policymakers (whether European or national) could be held accountable.