Il principio di condizionalità nella crisi dell’ordine di Maastricht

Until now the “principle of conditionality” had ruled, mainly, the Union’s relations with third countries, under the policy of development and cooperation or in relation to the accession process to the European Union. Today, in the midst of the economic crisis, the principle of conditionality guides, also, the relations within the Union, in the framework of the new European economic governance. From the early stages of the “sovereign debt crisis”, the granting of financial support for ‘peripheral countries’ was conditioned to the adoption of a plan focused on austerity and structural reforms. The principle of “strict conditionality” was ‘codified’ in the amended art. 136 TFEU and in the Treaty establishing the ESM. The case law of the European Court of Justice and of the Bundesverfassungsgericht confirmed the structural importance of the principle, while other constitutional courts try to defend the social core of their legal systems, by invoking the European principle of proportionality. Behind the apparently neutral formula of conditionality lies, in fact, an idea of solidarity well different from that which has so far led the “ever closer union among the Peoples of Europe”: a solidarity declined in the logic of an asymmetrical exchange between financial aid and structural reforms. The pretense to strengthen European unity through rigid mechanisms of solidarity conditioned by austerity and structural reforms has been, however, illusory. On the contrary, the new European economic governance has expanded dramatically the constitutional, social and economic asymmetries between the creditor countries and debtor countries.