Seminar with Tomasz Woźniakowski – State and future of European Union fiscal integration: Legitimacy, Regulation and Capacity in Comparative Perspective – December 3, 2025
Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Union remains in a state of fiscal liminality. The temporary, debt-based Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) under NextGenerationEU continues to support national investment and reform agendas until 2026, yet questions persist regarding its debt repayment and institutional legacy. At the same time, shifts in transatlantic relations and growing security imperatives have intensified demands for collective fiscal capacity, even as the EU budget remains limited and reliant on member state contributions. Against this backdrop, the reform of the Stability and Growth Pact and the renewed European Semester—a cycle of economic surveillance—raise fundamental questions about the legitimacy of the EU’s emerging fiscal governance framework. The new Semester architecture seeks to reconcile fiscal discipline with investment promotion, but its legitimacy must rest on both supranational accountability and domestic democratic endorsement. This talk presents the main findings of a forthcoming Journal of European Public Policy special issue, “State and Future of European Union Fiscal Integration” (eds. Tiziano Zgaga, Tomasz P. Woźniakowski, and Eva Thomann).
