European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, together with the president of the Euro Summit, Donald Tusk, the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, and the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, revealed ambitious plans on how to deepen the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as of July 1 and how to complete it by latest 2025.
To turn their vision for the future of EMU into reality, they put forward measures to be implemented in three stages. While some of the actions need to be frontloaded in the coming years, such as introducing a European Deposit Insurance Scheme, others go further as regards sharing of sovereignty among the member states that have the euro as their currency, such as creating a future eurozone treasury.
“This is part of the Five Presidents’ vision according to which the focus needs to move beyond rules to institutions in order to guarantee a rock-solid and transparent architecture of EMU. Delivering a deeper and fairer Economic and Monetary Union has been one of the top 10 priorities of president Juncker in his political guidelines,” the European Commission said.
“The euro is a currency shared by 19 EU member states and more than 330 million citizens. It is something to be proud of. It is something that protects Europe. But it is also something that can work better,” Juncker said.
“Our Economic and Monetary Union remains incomplete and I promised when taking office that I would work to consolidate and complement the unprecedented measures we took during the crisis and make them more socially fair and democratically legitimate. Today we, five presidents, are setting out our common vision. The world is watching us and they want to know where we are going. Today we lay out monetary integration and bring it to its ultimate destination.”
Despite the progress made in the past few years, particularly with the launch of the Banking Union, EMU remains incomplete. Divergence across the euro area is significant and the crisis of recent years has further highlighted existing shortcomings.
“It is clear that with 18 million unemployed and many within our societies exposed to risks of social exclusion, a lot more needs to be done to turn the euro area – the world’s second largest economy – into a rock-solid architecture. We need a lasting, fair and democratically legitimate basis for the future which contributes to more growth, jobs and prosperity for all citizens,” the Commission said.
The Commission will present a White Paper in spring 2017 outlining the steps needed, including legal measures to complete the second stage.
The strategy would work towards economic union, financial union, social union and also fiscal union.
“While euro area member states will continue to decide on taxation and the allocation of budgetary expenditures along national political choices, some decisions will increasingly need to be made collectively while ensuring democratic accountability and legitimacy.
“A future euro area treasury could be the place for such collective decision-making,” the Commission said.