Suspending vetoes: how the euro countries achieved unanimity in the fiscal compact

Abstract:

At the beginning of 2012, the 17 countries of the eurozone and eight of the ten remaining countries of the EU reached an agreement on the Treaty on Stability, Co-ordination, and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union (TSCG, known as the Fiscal Compact). The article traces six successive drafts of the agreement to discover how these countries reached agreement. We argue that there are three different procedures that can lead different actors with veto power over an agreement to suspend their veto – they increase, decrease or preserve the dimensionality of the underlying space. We call the three methods compensation, elimination and compromise respectively, and discover that in the Fiscal Compact the agreement was achieved mainly though elimination.