Sharing the Eurocrats’ dream: a demoicratic approach to EMU governance in the post-crisis era

We do not need to master the skills of Inception’s hero, Leonardo DiCaprio, to understand the Eurocrats’ dream. The dream involves flying over the plains, rivers and mountains of Europe on a constant mission to monitor and battle the dark shadows. In other words, to protect the European common good entrusted to them by the Treaties against the uncertainties of globalization, the selfishness of markets and the short-termism of politics. Europe’s citizens often seem to be on the same wavelength, with their huge distrust of politicians, abandonment of political parties and worries about the fate of their children. Eurocrats are here to make Europeans’ dreams of security and prosperity come true. Why then should we remotely wish to tamper with the Eurocrats’ dream? The reasons go back a long way indeed, we believe, to the foundational moment itself: our Eurocrats’ rationalization of their desire to ‘govern at a distance’. One could argue that the temptation to govern at a distance was a trope inherited from good old imperialism of yesteryear (Behr 2015, Nicolaïdis and Fisher Onar 2015). But in its post-war functionalist guise, such rationalization had much going for it. Weber had famously heralded organized bureaucratic hierarchies as the most efficient and rational way to organize human cooperation, maintain order, maximize efficiency and eliminate favoritism. Functionalists saw peace as only attainable by