The Constitutive Process of European Central Bank: Issues and Problems of the Institutional Aspects

Despite the flood of publications on the European Central Bank over the last twenty years, study and analysis of the institutional genesis of this body has not been similarly copious, apart from the significant work of René Smits in 1997 and to some extent also that of Seymour and Zilioli. However, these writers do not reconstruct in depth the reasons for the political choices of the actors who participated in the “invention” of the European Central Bank but dwell almost exclusively on the legal aspects. If, as Chesini and Fauri write, the ECB «acted as a glue at a time of deep economic crisis and inability to initiate new cooperative policies» becoming a bulwark against the financial crisis and an engine of integration, we believe that this outcome, if we can call it such, is the result of the politico-diplomatic action taken at the very beginnings of its conception. The establishment of a European Central Bank – almost as a fulfilment of the hopes and recommendations of the economist Robert Triffin – took shape within the process of development of European monetary unification, strengthened by the convergent political action of France and Germany in the mid-eighties after the deterioration of the Snake in the Tunnel.