Conclusion How to (Re-)Envision Eurozone Governance
After briefly setting the Eurozone crisis in international context, this Conclusion asks how the EU may move forward, to re-envision Eurozone governance while resolving the EU’s (euro) crisis of legitimacy in ways that ensure greater input, output, and throughput legitimacy. To do so, it recommends reforming Eurozone governance through a more fine-tuned approach to EU-level macroeconomic coordination via more differentiated country-specific targets debated by EU actors. And it proposes decentralizing the administration of the European Semester to ensure a more bottom-up process that is more sensitive to national varieties of capitalism and growth models. Only in so doing, the chapter argues, can there be greater democratic input at both EU and national levels, which could serve to reduce the citizen discontent driving populism. But for this to work, more solidarity mechanisms along with more resources are required not just for the Eurozone but equally across crisis areas, to ensure successful output performance. Finally, the chapter suggests that EU governance itself requires rethinking through more differentiated integration. Rather than a “hard core” moving forward, or Europe “à la carte,” the most effective future integration would be by seeing recognizing the EU as it already is: a “soft core” Europe of clusters of member states in overlapping policy communities, administered by one overall set of institutions.