Affected by the financial crisis and in order to receive financial assistance, several EU member states had to adopt structural adjustment programmes aiming at the reduction of public expenditures. Despite their differences, common feature of all financial assistance schemes was the combination of supranational and international legal instruments and institutions. Newly created financial assistance mechanisms, such as the EFSF and ESM, were created under international law and all financial assistance packages included the participation of the IMF. This hybrid nature of European financial assistance raises the question of whether the actors involved in the award of the assistance are bound by EU human rights. Against this background, this chapter first exposes the doubtful legitimacy of European financial assistance. Second, it analyses the CJEU case law on financial assistance conditionality from a human rights perspective, aiming to respond to the question of whether European actors were and could be bound by human rights when preparing financial assistance conditions. Third, it investigates the possibility of conceiving a legitimate role for courts in applying the procedural and substantive dimension of human rights accountability in times of crisis.

In the Spring of 1848 waves of liberal revolts roll over the Europe (the Springtime of Peoples). The insurgents demand more (guarantees for) freedoms and liberties cemented in new and liberal constitutions. And most of them want a parliament (parliamentary system) as well, with democratically chosen representatives at the helm instead of non-elected, autocratic leaders who are not politically answerable to anyone, lest to a parliament. Many of the authoritarian governments of the day initially give in to the demands of the people: a new fourth generation of liberal constitutions sweeps over the European continent (much of which are rolled back after a short while). This constitutional wave also ushers an era of new nations and the rise of nationalism.

This chapter documents the effect of Muslim military conquest on democratic governance after the initial expansion of Islam (from 632 to 1100). Whereas the previous two chapters established how Muslim conquest helped generate an equilibrium of centralized autocracy in conquered territories, this chapter traces the institutional legacy of the Islamic equilibrium through to the present. The statistical analysis in this chapter demonstrates how Muslim conquest slowed the adoption of representative assemblies in medieval Spain and then examines how territories conquered by Muslim armies tend to less democratic today. The latter analysis is careful to evaluate how Muslim conquest affected European colonialism. Finally, the chapter uses survey responses to show that Islamic culture does not explain the lack of democracy in many contemporary Muslim societies.

In this and the following chapters, we examine how IIAs have featured as an argument in national lawmaking. Our focus has been primarily on the general legislative bodies with the power to issue laws applicable to the whole state, that is, national parliaments. We open the chapter with a discussion on the general parameters of the selected countries’ IIA-compliance review mechanisms in lawmaking. In the second part of the chapter, each state in our case studies is presented through a snapshot of an illustrative use of an IIA argument in lawmaking that is typical of that state’s experience with the IIA regime. As these snapshots are often related to contingent historical events and processes, we do not suggest that these uses are somehow essential to that state. Instead, they significantly overshadow the other instances of using an IIA argument in lawmaking in that state.

In this second chapter dealing with the IIAs’ impact on lawmaking, we analyse and categorise other identified instances in which an IIA argument was used in the lawmaking processes. Here, we discuss invocations of IIA arguments in the lawmaking that appeared in a similar shape or form across the studied countries. We also documented cases that, while politically less significant, demonstrate curious intersections between IIAs and national lawmaking. First, we centre on four specific subject-matter areas in which the IIA argument has featured. Those relate to potentially discriminatory regulations, transparency of the public administration, fundamental rights, and expropriation and nationalisation measures. Then, we close with a section highlighting a miscellany of somewhat unexpected uses of the IIA argument. We bring attention to the attempts at influencing IIA obligations through national legislation, ambiguous examples of regulatory chill, and instances of vague and complementary uses of IIA arguments in lawmaking. The chapter presents general conclusions and broader insights on the IIAs’ impact on lawmaking, especially regarding the regulatory chill and positive spill-over theses.

The transition to globalized knowledge economies in recent decades have accelerated economic and social change across the globe.1 European democracies have been no exception to these developments. They have experienced rapid structural changes to their economies, increased social inequality, new social cleavages (see, for example, Chapter 11) and growing ethnic diversity resulting from migration. These changes have had political repercussions, including growing support for politically extreme challenger parties and the rise of populist political entrepreneurs in many countries (Iversen and Soskice 2019; Proaño, Peña and Saalfeld 2019; de Vries and Hobolt 2020). Some authors have even argued that the nature of partisan conflict itself has changed. While traditionally most European party systems were dominated by a socio-economic conflict between left-wing parties supporting tax-funded expansion of the welfare state and Keynesian economic policy and right-wing parties advocating a free-market economy (Laver and Hunt 1992), new voter coalitions have emerged (Hillen and Steiner 2019) and, in some cases, new challenger parties have been found to exploit a new ‘universalism-particularism’ dimension in political conflict (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). Where it has become politically relevant, this additional dimension of conflict has added further complexity to political competition in European democracies.

City-republics have traditionally served as exemplars of participatory government. Their bottom-up organization would seem to suggest an alternative path to representative emergence. The three chapters of Part II address this challenge of equifinality; this chapter does so in two ways. First, it points out that republics are different forms of governance than representative polities, as they eschew a central executive and don't involve the integration of varied social groups. Second, despite such differences, republics and municipal governance can also be shown to reflect the basic logic of this book, as they were preceded by a period of centralized rule under conditional relations. These enabled the institutional learning that was necessary for participatory institutions to consolidate. The absence of an executive, however, also meant that they did not survive over the long term. These points are demonstrated by an examination of Italian city-states and of the Low Countries. Both Flanders and Holland had a thriving urban sector, but they retained their participatory institutions longer because the exective authority of the count was comparatively greater. The Swiss Cantons are briefly considered. The role of trade emerges as endogenous to political organization.

The growing importance of foreign relations law raises the question of whether the traditional exclusion of parliaments from country’s foreign affairs is wrong and utterly flawed. While there are practical benefits in seeing foreign relations as belonging only to the executive branch, this approach undermines the potential for national parliaments to engage in developing this area of law. Hence, in this chapter I examine the role of parliaments in foreign relations law taking Bosnia and Herzegovina as an example. I argue that foreign affairs should be analysed as a matter of the distribution of powers between the executive and legislative branch, and not the exclusion of the foreign affairs power from the legislature. My main conclusion is that the impact of parliaments on foreign relations law depends on their role in a state and effective use of their competencies.

This final chapter raises a number of normative research questions for future discussion. How much financial power should be concentrated in representative assemblies? Does law govern the state if not enforced by the judiciary? Should an analytical wall be constructed between 'public' and 'private' finance in constitutional thinking? The promises and limitations of applying some analytical political theories to the design of constitutional institutions are observed, and importance of engaging with data concerning the deliberative capacities and resource constraints incumbent on politicians and public sector employees is emphasised. The conflict between Diceyan models of parliamentary control and modern welfare states is broached, as are the book's points of engagement with the work US constitutional theorists, particularly Scheuerman, Posner and Vermeule. Finally, the position of private financial markets vis-ˆ-vis the state is identified as an important topic in future examinations of finance and constitutionalism.

This chapter introduces the central questions broached in the book. How does law distribute authority over public finance between constitutional institutions? How did that law develop? What role do economic, financial and administrative conditions have on the distribution of financial authority between parliaments and executive governments? Do judiciaries play a meaningful role in supervising public finance? Does it make sense to understand parliaments to 'control' public finance in the parliamentary tradition of government? The chapter opens by explaining AV Dicey's understanding of parliamentary control of public finance and his influence on later academic and practical engagements with the financial aspect of constitutionalism. Critical financial concepts are then explained, particularly the different functions performed by fiscal activities (taxing and spending), debt finance and monetary finance. The dominant position of 'central' government finance to the modern constitutional state is introduced and the distinction between 'parliamentary' and 'congressional' constitutional systems is clarified. The chapter closes by summarising the book's major claims.